Antonio Labriola
Essays on the Materialist Conception of History

Translated by Charles H. Kerr
Chicago, Charles H. Kerr Co-operative
1908 (Italian Edition 1896)

Part 1:



In Memory of the Communist Manifesto




In three years we can celebrate our jubilee. The memorable date of publication
of the Communist Manifesto (February, 1848) marks our first unquestioned
entrance into history. To that date are referred all our judgments and all
our congratulations on the progress made by the proletariat in these last
fifty years. That date marks the beginning of the new era. This is arising,
or, rather, is separating itself from the present era, and is developing
by a process peculiar to itself and thus in a way that is necessary and inevitable,
whatever may be the vicissitudes and the successive phases which cannot yet
be foreseen.




All those in our ranks who have a desire or an occasion to possess a better
understanding of their own work should bring to mind the causes and the moving
forces which determined the genesis of the Manifesto, the circumstances under
which it appeared on the eve of the Revolution which burst forth from Paris
to Vienna, from Palermo to Berlin. Only in this way will it be possible for
us to find in the present social form the explanation of the tendency towards
socialism, thus showing by its present necessity the inevitability of its
triumph.




Is not that in fact the vital part of the Manifesto, its essence and its
distinctive character?




We surely should be taking a false road if we regarded as the essential
part the measures advised and proposed at the end of the second chapter for
the contingency of a revolutionary success on the part of the proletariat
-- or again the indications of political relationship to the other revolutionary
parties of that epoch which are found in the fourth chapter. These indications
and these measures, although they deserved to be taken into consideration
at the moment and under the circumstances where they were formulated and
suggested, and although they may be very important for forming a precise
estimate of the political action of the German communists in the revolutionary
period from 1848 to 1850, henceforth no longer form for us a mass of practical
judgments for or against which we should take sides in each contingency.
The political parties which since the International have established themselves
in different countries, in the name of the proletariat, and taking it clearly
for their base, have felt, and feel, in proportion as they are born and develop,
the imperious necessity of adopting and conforming their programme and their
action to circumstances always different and multiform. But not one of these
parties feels the dictatorship of the proletariat so near or even the temptation
to examine anew and pass judgment upon the measures proposed in the Manifesto.
There really are no historic experiences but those that history makes itself.
It is as impossible to foresee them as to plan them beforehand or make them
to order. That is what happened at the moment of the Commune, which was and
which still remains up to this day the only experience (although partial
and confused because it was sudden and of short duration) of the action of
the proletariat in gaining control of political power. This experience, too,
was neither desired nor sought for, but imposed by circumstances. It was
heroically carried through and has become a salutary lesson for us today.
It might easily happen that where the socialist movement is still in its
beginnings, appeal may be made, for lack of personal direct experience --
as often happens in Italy -- to the authority of a text from the Manifesto
as if it were a precept, but these passages are in reality of no importance.




Again, we must not, as I believe, seek for this vital part, this essence,
this distinctive character, in what the Manifesto says of the other forms
of socialism of which it speaks under the name of literature. The entire
third chapter may doubtless serve for defining clearly by way of exclusion
and antithesis, by brief but vigorous characterizations, the differences
which really exist between the communism commonly characterized to-day as
scientific -- an expression sometimes used in a mistaken way -- that is to
say, between the communism which has the proletariat for its subject and
the proletarian revolution for its theme, and the other forms of socialism;
reactionary, bourgeois, semi-bourgeois, petite-bourgeois, utopian, etc. All
these forms except one(1*) have re-appeared and renewed themselves more than
once. They are re-appearing under a new form even to-day in the countries
where the modern proletarian movement is of recent birth. For these countries
and under these circumstances the Manifesto has exercised and still exercises
the function of contemporary criticism and of a literary whip. And in the
countries where these forms have already been theoretically and practically
outgrown, as in Germany and Austria, or survive only as an individual opinion
among a few, as in France and England, without speaking of other nations,
the Manifesto from this point of view has played its part. It thus merely
records as a matter of history something no longer necessary to think of,
since we have to deal with the political action of the proletariat which
already is before us in its gradual and normal course.




That was, to anticipate, the attitude of mind of those who wrote it. By
the force of their thought and with some scanty data of experience they had
anticipated the events which have occurred and they contented themselves
with declaring the elimination and the condemnation of what they had outgrown.
Critical communism -- that is its true name, and there is none more exact
for this doctrine -- did not take its stand with the feudalists in regretting
the old society for the sake of criticising by contrast the contemporary
society -- it had an eye only to the future. Neither did it associate itself
with the petty bourgeois in the desire of saving what cannot be saved --
as, for example, small proprietorship, or the tranquil life of the small
proprietor whom the bewildering action of the modern state, the necessary
and natural organ of present society, destroys and overturns, because by
its constant revolutions it carries in itself the necessity for other revolutions
new and more fundamental.




Neither did it translate into metaphysical whimsicalities, into sickly
sentimentalism, or into a religious contemplation, the real contrasts of
the material interests of every day life: on the contrary, it exposed those
contrasts in all their prosaic reality. It did not construct the society
of the future upon a plan harmoniously conceived in each of its parts. It
has no word of eulogy and exaltation, of invocation and of regret, for the
two goddesses of philosophic mythology, justice and equality, those two goddesses
who cut so sad a figure in the practical affairs of everyday life, when we
observe that the history of so many centuries maliciously amuses itself by
nearly always contradicting their infallible suggestions. Once more these
communists, while declaring on the strength of facts which carry conviction
that the mission of the proletarians is to be the grave diggers of the bourgeoisie,
still recognize the latter as the author of a social form which represents
extensively and intensively an important stage of progress, and which alone
can furnish the field for the new struggles which already give promise of
a happy issue for the proletariat. Never was funeral oration so magnificent.
There is in these praises addressed to the bourgeoisie a certain tragical
humor -- they have been compared to dithyrambics.




The negative and antithetical definitions of other forms of socialism
then current, which have often re-appeared since, even up to the present
time, although they are fundamentally beyond criticism both in their form
and their aim, nevertheless, do not pretend to be and are not the real history
of socialism; they furnish neither its outlines nor its plan for him who
would write it. History in reality does not rest upon the distinction between
the true and the false, the just and the unjust and still less upon the more
abstract antithesis between the possible and the real as if the things were
on one side and on the other side were their shadows and their reflections
in ideas. History is all of a piece, and it rests upon the process of formation
and transformation of society; and that evidently in a fashion altogether
objective and independent of our approval or disapproval. It is a dynamic
of a special class to speak like the positivists who are so dainty with expressions
of this sort but are often dominated by the new phrases they have put out.
The different socialist forms of thought and action which have appeared and
disappeared in the course of the centuries, so different in their causes,
their aspects, and their effects, are all to be studied and explained by
the specific and complex conditions of the social life in which they were
produced. Upon a close examination it is seen that they do not form one single
whole of continuous process because the series is frequently interrupted
by changes in the social fabric and by the disappearance and breaking off
of the tradition. It is only since the French Revolution that socialism presents
a certain unity of process, which appears more evident since 1830 with the
definite political supremacy of the capitalist class in France and England
and which finally becomes obvious, we might say even palpable, since the
rise of the International. Upon this road the Manifesto stands like a colossal
guide post bearing a double inscription: on one side the first sketch of
the new doctrine which has now made the circle of the world; on the other,
the definition of its relations to the forms which it excludes, without giving,
however, any historic account of them.




The vital part, the essence, the distinctive character of this work are
all contained in the new conception of history which permeates it and which
in it is partially explained and developed. By the aid of this conception,
communism, ceasing to be a hope, an aspiration, a remembrance, a conjecture,
and expedient, found for the first time its adequate expression in the realization
of its very necessity, that is to say, in the realization that it is the
outcome and the solution of the struggles of existing classes. These struggles
have varied according to times and places and out of them history has developed;
but, they are all reduced in our days to the single struggle between the
capitalist bourgeois and the workingmen inevitably forced into the ranks
of the proletariat. The Manifesto gives the genesis of this struggle; it
details its evolutionary rhythm, and predicts its final result.




In that conception of history is embodied the whole doctrine of scientific
communism. From that moment the theoretical adversaries of socialism have
no longer had to discuss the abstract possibility of the democratic socialization
of the means of production;(2*) as if it were possible in this question to
rest their judgment upon inductions based upon the general and common aptitudes
of what they characterize as human nature. Thenceforth, the question was
to recognize, or not to recognize, in the course of human events the necessity
which stands over and above our sympathy and our subjective assent. Is or
is not society in the countries most advanced in civilization organized in
such a way that it will pass into communism by the laws inherent in its own
future, once conceding its present economic structure and the friction which
it necessarily produces within itself, and which will end by breaking and
dissolving it? That is the subject of all discussion since the appearance
of this theory and thence follows also the rule of conduct which imposes
itself upon the action of the socialist parties whether they have in their
ranks men who have come out from the other classes and who join as volunteers
the army of the proletariat.




That is why we voluntarily accept the epithet of scientific, provided
we do not thus confuse ourselves with the positivists, sometimes embarrassing
guests, who assume to themselves a monopoly of science; we do not seek to
maintain an abstract and generic thesis like lawyers or sophists, and we
do not plume ourselves on demonstrating the reasonableness of our aims. Our
intentions are nothing less than the theoretical expression and the practical
explanation of the data offered us by the interpretation of the process which
is being accomplished among us and about us and which has it whole existence
in the objective relations of social life of which we are the subject and
the object, the cause and the effect. Our aims are rational, not because
they are founded on arguments drawn from the reasoning of reason, but because
they are derived from the objective study of things, that is to say, from
the explanation of their process, which is not, and which cannot be, a result
of our will but which on the contrary triumphs over our will and subdues
it.




Not one of the previous or subsequent works of the authors of the Manifesto
themselves, although they have a much more considerable scientific leaning,
can replace the Manifesto or have the same specific efficacy. It gives us
in its classic simplicity the true expression of this situation; the modern
proletariat exists, takes its stand, grows and develops in contemporary history
as the concrete subject, the positive force whose necessarily revolutionary
action must find in communism its necessary outcome. And that is why this
work while giving a theoretical base to its prediction and expressing it
in brief, rapid and concise formulae, forms a storehouse, or rather an inexhaustible
mine of embryonic thoughts which the reader may fertilize and multiply indefinitely;
it preserves all the original and originating force of the thing which is
but lately born and which has not yet left the field of its production. This
observation is intended especially for those who applying a learned ignorance,
when they are not humbugs, charlatans, or amiable dilletanti, give to the
doctrine of critical communism precursors, patrons, allies and masters of
every class without any respect for common sense and the most vulgar chronology.
Or, again they try to bring back our materialistic conception of history
into the theory of universal evolution which to the minds of many is but
a new metaphor of a new metaphysics. Or again they seek in this doctrine
a derivative of Darwinism which is an analogous theory only in a certain
point of view and in a very broad sense; or again they have they condescension
to favor us with the alliance or the patronage of that positive philosophy
which extends from Comte, that degenerate and reactionary disciple of the
genial Saint-Simon, to Spencer, that quintessence of anarchical capitalism,
which is to say that they wish to give us for allies our most open adversaries.




It is to its origin that this work owes its fertilizing power, its classic
strength, and the fact that it has given in so few pages the synthesis of
so many series and groups of ideas.(3*)




It is the work of two Germans, but it is not either in its form or its
basis the expression of personal opinion. It contains no trace of the imprecations,
or the anxieties, or the bitterness familiar to all political refugees and
to all those who have voluntarily abandoned their country to breathe elsewhere
freer air. Neither do we find in it the direct reproduction of the conditions
of their own country, then in a deplorable political state and which could
not be compared to those of France and England socially and economically,
except as regards certain portions of their territory. They brought to their
work, on the contrary, the philosophical thought which alone had placed and
maintained their country upon the level of contemporary history: -- this
philosophic thought which in their hands was undergoing that important transformation
which permitted materialism, already renewed by Feuerbach combined with dialectics,
to embrace and understand the movement of history in its most secret and
until then unexplored causes, -- unexplored because hidden and difficult
to observe. Both were communists and revolutionists, but they were so neither
by instinct, by impulse nor by passion. They had elaborated an entirely new
criticism of economic science and they had understood the connection and
the historic meaning of the proletarian movement on both sides of the Channel,
in France and in England, before they were called to give in the Manifesto
the programme and the doctrine of the Communist League. This had its center
in London and numerous branches on the continent; it had behind it a life
and a development of its own.




Engels had already published a critical essay in which passing over all
subjective and one-sided corrections he brought out for the first time in
an objective fashion the criticism of political economy and of the antitheses
inherent in the data and the concepts of that economy itself, and he had
become celebrated by the publication of a book on the condition of the working
class which was the first attempt to represent the movements of the working
class as a result of the workings of the forces and means of production.(4*)
Marx, in the few years preceding, had become known as a radical publicist
in Germany, Paris and Brussels. He had conceived the first rudiments of the
materialistic conception of history. He had made a theoretically victorious
criticism of the hypotheses of Proudhon and the deductions from his doctrine,
and had given the first precise explanation of the origin of surplus value
as a consequence of the purchase and the use of labor power, that is to say
the first germ of the conceptions which were later demonstrated and explained
in their connection and their details in Capital. Both men were in touch
with the revolutionists of the different countries of Europe, notably France,
Belgium and England; their Manifesto was not the expression of their personal
theory, but the doctrine of a party whose spirit, aim and activity already
formed the International Workingmen's Association.




These are the beginnings of modern socialism. We find here the line which
separates it from all the rest.




The Communist League grew out of the League of the Just; the latter in
its turn had been formed with a clear consciousness of its proletarian aims
through a gradual specialization of the generic group of the refugees, the
exiles. As a type, bearing within itself in an embryonic design the form
of all the later socialist and proletarian movements, it had traversed the
different phases of conspiracy and of equalitarian socialism. It was metaphysical
under Gruen and utopian with Weitling. Having its principal seat at London
it was interested in the Chartist movement and had had some influence over
it. This movement showed by its disordered character, because it was neither
the fruit of a premeditated experience, nor the embodiment of a conspiracy
or of a sect, how painfully and difficult was the formation of a proletarian
political party. the socialist tendency was not manifested in Chartism until
the movement was near its end and was nearly finished (though Jones and Horner
can never be forgotten). The League everywhere carried an odor of revolution,
both because the thing was in the air and because its instinct and method
of procedure tended that way: and as long as the revolution was bursting
forth effectively, it provided itself, thanks to the new doctrine of the
Manifesto, with an instrument of orientation which was at the same time a
weapon for combat. In fact, already international, both by the quality and
differences of origin of its members, and still more by the result of the
instinct and devotion of all, it took its place in the general movement of
political life as the clear and definite precursor of all that can to-day
be called modern socialism, if by modern we mean not the simple fact of extrinsic
chronology but an index of the internal or organic process of society.




A long interruption from 1852 to 1864 which was the period of political
reaction and at the same time that of the disappearance, the dispersion and
the absorption of the old socialist schools, separates the International
of the Arbeiterbildungsverein of London, from the International properly
so called, which, from 1864 to 1873, strove to put unity into the struggle
of the proletariat of Europe and America. The action of the proletariat had
other interruptions especially in France, and with the exception of Germany,
from the dissolution of the International of glorious memory up to the new
International which lives to-day through other means and which is developing
in other ways, both of them adapted to the political situation in which we
live, and based upon riper experience. But just as the survivors of those
who in December, 1847, discussed and accepted the new doctrine, have re-appeared
on the public scene in the great International and later again in the new
International, the Manifesto itself has also re-appeared little by little
and has made the tour of the world in all the languages of the civilized
countries, something which it promised to do but could not do at the time
of is first appearance.




There was our real point of departure; there were our real precursors.
They marched before all the others, early in the day, with a step rapid but
sure, over this exact road which we were to traverse and which we are traversing
in reality. It is not proper to give the name of our precursors to those
who followed ways which they later had to abandon, or to those who, to speak
without metaphor, formulated doctrines and started movements, doubtless explicable
by the times and circumstances of their birth, but which were later outgrown
by the doctrine of critical communism, which is the theory of the proletarian
revolution. This does not mean that these doctrines and these attempts were
accidental, useless and superfluous phenomena. There is nothing irrational
in the historic course of things because nothing comes into existence without
reason, and thus there is nothing superfluous. We cannot even to-day arrive
at a perfect understanding of critical communism without mentally retracing
these doctrines and following the processes of their appearance and disappearance.
In fact these doctrines have not only passed, they have been intrinsically
outgrown both by reason of the change in the conditions of society and by
reason of the more exact understanding of the laws upon which rest its formation
and its process.




The moment at which they enter into the past, that is to say, that at
which they are intrinsically outgrown, is precisely that of the appearance
of the Manifesto. As the first index of the genesis of modern socialism,
this writing, which gives only the most general and the most easily accessible
features of its teaching, bears within itself traces of the historic field
within which it was born, which was that of France, England and Germany.
Its field for propaganda and diffusion has since become wider and wider,
and it is henceforth as vast as the civilized world. In all countries in
which the tendency to communism has developed through antagonisms under aspects
different but every day more evident between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,
the process of its first formation is wholly or partly repeated over and
over. The proletarian parties which are formed little by little have traversed
anew the stages of formation which their precursors traversed at first; but
his process has become from country to country and from year to year always
more rapid by reason of the greater evidence, the pressing necessity and
energy of the antagonisms, and because it is easier to create both for the
first time. Our co-workers of 50 years ago were also from this point of view
international, since by their example they started the proletariat of the
different nations upon the general march which labor must accomplish.




But the perfect theoretical knowledge of socialism today, as before, and
as it always will be, lies in the understanding of its historic necessity,
that is to say, in the consciousness of the manner of its genesis; and this
is precisely reflected, as in a limited field of observation and in a hasty
example, in the formation of the Manifesto. It was intended for a weapon
of war and thus bears upon its own exterior the traces of its origin. It
contains more substantial declarations than demonstrations. The demonstration
rests entirely in the imperative force of its necessity. But we may retrace
the process of this formation and to retrace it is to understand truly the
doctrine of the Manifesto. There is an analysis which while separating in
theory the factors of an organism destroys them in so far as they are elements
contributing to the unity of the whole. But there is another analysis, and
this alone permits us to understand history, which only distinguishes and
separates the elements to find again in them the objective necessity of their
co-operation toward the total result.




It is now a current of opinion that modern socialism is a normal and thus
and inevitable product of history. Its political action, which may in future
involve delays and set-backs but never henceforth a total absorption, begin
with the International. Nevertheless, the Manifesto precedes it. Its teaching
is of prime importance in the light which it throws on the proletarian movement,
which movement indeed had its birth and development independently of any
doctrine. it is also more than this light. Critical communism dates from
the moment when the proletarian movement is not merely a result of social
conditions, but when it has already strength enough to understand that these
conditions can be changed and to discern what means can modify them and in
what direction. It was not enough to say that socialism was a result of history.
It was also necessary to understand the intrinsic causes of this outcome
and to what all its activity tended. This affirmation, that the proletariat
is a necessary result of modern society, has for its mission to succeed the
bourgeoisie, and to succeed it as the producing force of a new social order
in which class antagonisms shall disappear, makes of the Manifesto a characteristic
epoch in the general course of history. It is a revolution -- but not in
the sense of an apocalypse or a promised millennium. It is the scientific
and reflected revelation of the way which our civil society is traversing
(if the shade of Fourier will pardon me!).




The Manifesto thus gives us the inside history of its origin and thereby
justifies its doctrine and at the same time explains its singular effect
and its wonderful efficacy. Without losing ourselves in details, here are
the series and groups of elements which, reunited and combined in this rapid
and exact synthesis, give us the clue to all the later development of scientific
socialism.




The immediate, direct and appreciable material is given by France and
England which had already had since 1830 a working-class movement which sometimes
resembles and sometimes differentiates itself from the other revolutionary
movements and which extended from instinctive revolt to the practical aims
of the political parties (Chartism and Social Democracy for example) and
gave birth to different temporary and perishable forms of communism and semi-communism
like that to which the name of socialism was then given.




To recognize in these movements no longer the fugitive phenomenon of meteoric
disturbances but a new social fact, there was need of a theory which should
explain them, -- and a theory which should not be a simple complement of
the democratic tradition nor the subjective correction of the disadvantages,
thenceforth recognized, of the economy of competition: although many were
then concerned with this. This new theory was the personal work of Marx and
Engels. They carried over the conception of historical progress through the
process of antitheses from the abstract form, which the Hegelian dialectic
had already described in its most general features, to the concrete explanation
of the class struggle; and in this historic movement where it had been supposed
that we observed the passage from one from of ideas to another form they
saw for the first time the transition from one form of social anatomy to
another, that is from one form of economic production to another form.




This historic conception, which gave a theoretic form to this necessity
of the new social revolution more or less explicit in the instinctive consciousness
of the proletariat and in its passionate and spontaneous movements, recognizing
the intrinsic and imminent necessity of the revolution, changed the concept
of it. That which the sects of conspirators had regarded as belonging to
the domain of the will and capable of being constructed at pleasure, became
a simple process which might be favored, sustained, and assisted. The revolution
became the object of a policy the conditions of which are given by the complex
situation of society; it therefore became a result which the proletariat
must attain through struggles and various means of organization which the
old tactics of revolts had not yet imagined. And this because the proletariat
is not an accessory and auxiliary means, an excrescence, an evil, which can
be eliminated from the society in which we are living but because it is its
substratum, its essential condition, its inevitable effect and in turn the
cause which preserves and maintains society itself; and thus it cannot emancipate
itself without at the same time emancipating every one, that is to say, revolutionizing
completely the form of production.




Just as the League of the Just had become The Communist League by stripping
itself of the forms of symbolism and conspiracy and adopting little by little
the means of propaganda and of political action from and after the check
attending the insurrection of Barbès and Blanqui, so likewise the
new doctrine, which the League accepted and made its own, definitively abandoned
the ideas which inspired the action of conspiracies, and conceived as the
outcome and objective result of a process, that which the conspirators believed
to be the result of a pre-determined plan or the emanation from their heroism.




At that point begins a new ascending line in the order of facts and another
connection of concepts and of doctrines.




The communism of conspiracy, the Blanquism of that time, carries us up
through Buonarotti and also through Bazard and the "Carbonari"
to the conspiracy of Baboeuf, a true heir of ancient tragedy who hurled himself
against fate because there was no connection between his aim and the economic
condition of the moment, and he was as yet incapable of bringing upon the
political scene a proletariat having a broad class consciousness. From Baboeuf
and certain less known elements of the Jacobin period, past Boissel and Fauchet
we ascend to the intuitive Morelly and to the original and versatile Mably
and if you please to the chaotic Testament of the curé Meslier, an
instinctive and violent rebellion of "good sense" against the savage
oppression endured by the unhappy peasant.




These precursors of the socialism of violence, protest and conspiracy
were all equalitarians; as were also most of the conspirators. Thus by a
singular but inevitable error they took for a weapon of combat, interpreting
it and generalizing it, that same doctrine of equality which, developing
as a natural right parallel to the formation of the economic theory, had
become an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie which was winning step
by step its present position to transform the society of privilege into that
of liberalism, free exchange and the civil code.(5*)




Following this immediate deduction which at bottom was a simple illusion,
that all men being equal in nature should also be equal in their enjoyments,
it was thought that the appeal to reason carried with it all the elements
of propaganda and persuasion, and that the rapid, immediate and violent taking
possession of the exterior instruments of political power was the only means
to set right those who resisted.




But whence come and how persist all these inequalities which appear so
irrational in the light of a concept of justice so simple and so elementary?
The Manifesto was the clear negation of the principle of equality understood
so naively and so clumsily. While proclaiming as inevitable the abolition
of classes in the future form of collective production, it explains to us
the necessity, the birth and the development of these very classes as a fact
which is not an exception, or a derogation of an abstract principle, but
the very process of history.




Even as the modern proletariat involves the bourgeoisie, so the latter
cannot exist without the former. And both are the result of a process of
formation which rests altogether upon the new mode of production of the objects
necessary to life, that is to say, which rests altogether on the manner of
economic production. The bourgeois society grew out of the corporative and
feudal society and it grew out of it through struggle and revolution in order
to take possession of the instruments and means of production which all culminate
in the formation, the development and the multiplication of capital. To describe
the origin and the progress of the bourgeoisie in its different phases, to
explain its successes in the colossal development of technique and in the
conquest of the world market, and to point out the political transformations
which followed it, which are the expression, the defense and the result of
these conquests is, at the same time, to write the history of the proletariat.
The latter in its present condition is inherent in the epoch of bourgeois
society and it has had, it has, and will have as many phases as that society
itself up to the time of its extinction. The antithesis of rich an poor,
of happy and unhappy, of oppressors and oppressed is not something accidental
which can easily be put on one side as was believed by the enthusiasts of
justice. Still further it is a fact of necessary correlation, once granted
the directing principle of the present form of production which makes the
wageworker a necessity. This necessity is double. Capital can only take possession
of production by converting laborers into proletarians and it cannot continue
to live, to be fruitful, to accumulate, to multiply itself and to transform
itself except on the condition of paying wages to those who it has made proletarians.
The latter, on their side, can only live and reproduce their kind on the
condition of selling themselves as labor power, the use of which is left
to the discretion, that is to say, to the good pleasure of the possessors
of capital. The harmony between capital and labor is wholly contained in
this fact that labor is the living force by which the proletarians continually
put in motion and reproduce by adding to it the labor accumulated in capital.
This connection resulting from a development which is the whole inner essence
of modern history, if it gives the key to comprehend the true reason of the
new class struggle of which the communist conception has become the expression,
is of such a nature that no sentimental protest, no argument based on justice
can resolve and disentangle it.




It is for these reasons which I have explained here as simply as possible
that equalitarian communism remained vanquished. Its practical powerlessness
blended with its theoretical inability to account for the causes of the wrongs
or of the inequalities which it desired, bravely or stupidly, to destroy
or eliminate at a blow.




To understand history became thenceforth the principal task of the theorists
of communism. How could a cherished ideal be still opposed to the hard reality
of history? Communism is not the natural and necessary state of human life
in all times and in all places and the whole course of historic formations
cannot be considered as a series of deviations and wanderings. One does not
reach communism by Spartan abnegation or Christian resignation. It can be,
still more it must be and it will be the consequence of the dissolution of
our capitalist society. But the dissolution cannot be inoculated into it
artificially nor imported from without. It will dissolve by its own weight
as Machiavelli would say. It will disappear as a form of production which
engenders of itself and in itself the constant and increasing rebellion of
it productive forces against the conditions (juridical and political) of
production and it continues to live only by augmenting (through competition
which engenders crises, and by a bewildering extension of its sphere of action)
the intrinsic conditions of its inevitable death. The death of a social form
like that which comes from natural death in any other branch of science becomes
a physiological case.




The Manifesto did not make, and it was not its part to make the picture
of a future society. It told how our present society will dissolve by the
progressive dynamics of its forces. To make this understood it was necessary
above all to explain the development of the bourgeoisie and this was done
in rapid sketches, a model philosophy of history, which can be retouched,
completed and developed, but which cannot be corrected.(6*)




Saint-Simon and Fourier, although neither their ideas nor the general
trend of their development were accepted, found their justification. Idealists
both, they had by their heroic vision transcended the "liberal"
epoch which in their horizon had its culminating point at the epoch of the
French revolution. The former in his interpretation of history substituted
social physics for economic law and politics, and in spite of many idealistic
and positivistic uncertainties, he almost discovered the genesis of the third
estate. The other, ignorant of details which were still unknown or neglected,
in the exuberance of his undisciplined spirit imagined a great chain of historic
epochs vaguely distinguished by certain indications of the directing principle
of the forms of production and distribution. He thereupon proposed to himself
to construct a society in which the existing antitheses should disappear.
From all these antitheses he discovered by a flash of genius and he, more
than any other, developed "the vicious circle of production"; he
there unconsciously reached the position of Sismondi, who at the same epoch,
but with other intentions and along different roads, studying crises and
denouncing the disadvantages of the large scale industry and of unbridled
competition, announced the collapse of the newly established economic science.
From the summit of his serene mediation on the future world of the harmonians
he looked down with a serene contempt upon the misery of civilization and
unmoved wrote the satire of history. Ignorant both, because idealists, of
the bitter struggle which the proletariat is called upon to maintain before
putting an end to the epoch of exploitation and of antitheses, they arrived
through a subjective necessity at their conclusions, in the one case scheme-making,
in the other utopianism. But as by divination they foresaw some of the direct
principles of a society without antitheses. The former reached a clear conception
of the technical government of society in which should disappear the domination
of man over man, and the other divined, foresaw and prophesied along with
the extravagances of his luxuriant imagination a great number of the important
traits of the psychology and pedagogy of that future society in which according
to the expression of the Manifesto, "the free development of each is
the condition of the free development of all."




It is not in the name of a school, but as the promise, the threat, and
the desire of a party that the new doctrine of critical communism presented.
Its authors and its adherents did not feed upon the utopian manufacture of
the future but their minds were full of the experience and the necessity
of the present. They united with the proletarians whom instance, not as yet
fortified by experience, impelled to overthrow, at Paris and in England,
the rule of the bourgeois class with a rapidity of movement not guided by
well-considered tactics. These communists disseminated their revolutionary
ideas in Germany: they were the defenders of the June martyrs, and they had
in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung a political organ, extracts from which, reproduced
occasionally after so many years, still carry authority.(7*) After the disappearance
of the historic situations which in 1848 had pushed the proletarians to the
front of the political stage, the doctrines of the Manifesto no longer found
either a foundation or a field for diffusion. Many years were required before
it circulated again and that because many years were required before the
proletariat could re-appear by other roads and under other methods as a political
force upon the scene, making of this doctrine its intellectual organ and
directing its course by it.




But from the day when the doctrine appeared it made its anticipated criticism
of that socialismus vulgaris which was flourishing in Europe and especially
in France from the Coup d'Etat to the International; the latter moreover
in its short period of life had not time to vanquish and eliminate it. This
vulgar socialism found its intellectual food (when nothing even more incoherent
and chaotic was at hand) in the doctrine and especially in the paradoxes
of Proudhon who had already been vanquished theoretically by Marx(8*) but
who was not vanquished practically until the time of the Commune when his
disciples, and it was a salutary lesson in affairs, were forced to act in
opposition to their own doctrines and those of their master.




From the time of its appearance, this new communist doctrine carried and
implied criticism of all forms of State socialism, from Louis Blanc to Lassalle.
This State socialism, although mingled with revolutionary doctrines, was
then summed up in the empty dream, in the abracadabra, of the Right to Work.
This is an insidious formula if it implies a demand addressed to a government
even of revolutionary bourgeois. It is an economic absurdity if by it is
meant to suppress the unemployment which ensues upon the variations of wages,
that is to say upon the conditions of competition. It may be a tool for politicians,
if it serves as an expedient to calm a shapeless mass of unorganized proletarians.
This is very evident for any one who conceives clearly the course of a victorious
proletarian revolution which cannot proceed to the socialization of the means
of production by taking possession of them, that is to say, which cannot
arrive at the economic form in which there is neither merchandise nor wage
labor and in which the right to work and the duty of working are one and
the same, mingle in the common necessity of labor for all.




The mirage of the right to work ended in the tragedy of June. The parliamentary
discussion of which it was the object in the sequel was nothing but a parody.
Lamartine, that tearful rhetorician, that great man for all proper occasions,
had pronounced the last, or the next to the last of his celebrated phrases,
"Catastrophes are the experiences of nations," and that sufficed
for the irony of history.




The brevity and simplicity of the Manifesto were wholly foreign to the
insinuating rhetoric of faith or creed. It was of the utmost inclusiveness
by virtue of the many ideas which it for the first time reduced to a system
and it was a series of germs capable of an immense development. But it was
not, and it did not pretend to be a code of socialism, a catechism of critical
communism, or the handbook of the proletarian revolution. We may leave its
"quintessence" to the illustrious Dr. Schaeffle, to whom also we
willingly leave the famous phrase, "The social question is a question
of the stomach."




The "ventre" of Dr. Schaeffle has for long years cut a fine
enough figure in the world to the great advantage of the dilletanti in socialism
and to the delight of the politicians. Critical communism, in reality, scarcely
begun with the Manifesto it needed to develop and it has developed effectively.




The sum total of the teachings customarily designated by the name of "Marxism"
did not arrive at maturity before the years 1860-70. It is certainly a long
step from the little work Wage Labor and Capital(9*) in which is seen for
the first time in precise terms how from the purchase and the use of the
labor-commodity is obtained a product superior to the cost of production,
this being the clue to the question of surplus value -- it is a long step
from this to the complex and multiple developments of "Capital."
This book goes exhaustively into the genesis of the bourgeois epoch in all
its inner economic structure, and intellectually it transcends that epoch
because it explains its course, its particular laws and the antitheses which
it organically produces and which organically dissolve it.




It is a long step also from the proletarian movement which succumbed in
1848 to the present proletarian movement which through great difficulties
after having re-appeared on the political scene has developed with continuity
and deliberation. Until a few years ago this regularity of the forward march
of the proletariat was observed and admired only in Germany. The social democracy
there had normally increased as upon its own field (from the Workingmen's
Conference of Nuremberg, 1868, to our day.) But since then the same phenomenon
has asserted itself in other countries, under various forms.




In this broad development of Marxism and in this increase of the proletarian
movement in the limited forms of political action, has there not been, as
some assert, an alteration from the militant character of the original form
of critical communism? Has there not been a passing from revolution to the
self-styled evolution? Has there not been an acquiescence of the revolutionary
spirit in the exigencies of the reform movement?




These reflections and these objections have arisen and arise continually
both among the most enthusiastic and most passionate of the socialists and
among the adversaries of socialism whose interest its is to give an appearance
of uniformity to the special defeats, checks and delays, so as to affirm
that communism has no future.




Whoever compares the present proletarian movement and its varied and complicated
course with the impression left by the Manifest when one reads it without
being provided with knowledge from other sources, may easily believe that
there was something juvenile and premature in the confident boldness of those
communists of fifty years ago. There is in them the sound as of a battle
cry and an echo of the vibrant eloquence of some of the orators of Chartism;
there is the declaration of a new `93 with no room left of a new Thermidor.




And Thermidor has re-appeared several times since in various forms, more
or less explicit or disguised, and their authors have been since 1848 French
ex-radicals, or Italian ex-patriots, or German bureaucrats, adorers of the
god State and practically slaves of the god Mammon, English parliamentarians
broken by the artifices of the art of government, or even politicians under
the guise of anarchists. Many people believe that the constellation of Thermidor
is destined never to disappear from the heaven of history, or to speak in
a more prosaic fashion, that liberalism, that is to say a society where men
are equal only in law, marks the extreme limit of human evolution beyond
which nothing remains but a return backward. That is the opinion of all those
who see in the progressive extension of the bourgeois form over the whole
world the reason and the end of all progress. Whether they are optimists
or pessimists here are, for them, the columns of Hercules of the human race.
Often it happens that this sentiment in its pessimistic form operates unconsciously
upon some of those, who, with others unclassified, go to swell the ranks
of anarchism.




There are others who go further and who theorize upon the objective improbabilities
of the assertions of critical communism. That affirmation of the Manifesto
that the reduction of all class struggles to a single one carries within
itself the necessity of the proletarian revolution, would seem to them intrinsically
false. That doctrine would be without foundation because it assumes to draw
a theoretical deduction and a practical rule of conduct from the prevision
of a fact which, according to these adversaries, would be a simple theoretical
point which might be displaced and set ahead indefinitely. The assumed inevitable
collision between the productive forces and the form of production would
never take place because it is reduced, as they claim, to an infinite number
of particular cases of friction, because it multiplies itself into the partial
collisions of economic competition, and because it meets with checks and
hindrances in the expedients and attacks of the governmental art. In other
words, our present society, instead of breaking up and dissolving would in
a continuous fashion repair the evils which it produced. Every proletarian
movement which is not repressed by violence as was that of June, 1848, and
that of May, 18871, would perish of slow exhaustion as happened with Chartism
which ended in trade unionism, the war horse of this fashion of arguing,
the honor and glory of the economists and the vulgar sociologists. Every
modern proletarian movement would be regarded as meteoric and not organic,
it would be a disturbance and not a process, and according to these critics,
in spite of ourselves, we should still be utopians.




The historic forecast which is found in the doctrine of the Manifesto
and which critical communism has since developed by a broad and detailed
analysis of the actual world, has certainly taken on by reason of the circumstances
in which it was produced a warlike appearance and a very aggressive form.
But it did not imply, anymore than it implies now, either a chronological
datum or a prophetic picture of the social organization like those in the
apocalypses and the ancient prophesies.




The heroic Father Dolcino did not re-appear with the prophetic war cry
of Joachino del Fiore. We did not celebrate anew at Münster the resurrection
of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. There were not more Taborites nor millenarians.
Nor was there another Fourier waiting in his house at a fixed hour year after
year for the "candidate of humanity." Nor again, was there an initiator
of a new life, beginning with artificial means to create the first nucleus
of an association proposing to make man over, as was the case with Beller,
Owen, Cabet, and the enterprise of the Fourierites in Texas, which was the
tomb of utopianism, marked by a singular epitaph: the dumbness which succeeded
the fiery eloquence of Considerant. Neither is there here a sect which retires
modestly and timidly from the world in order to celebrate in a closed circle
the perfect idea of communism as in the socialist colonies of America.




Here, on the contrary, in the doctrine of critical communism, it is society
as a whole which at a moment of its general process discovers the cause of
its destined course and at a critical point asserts itself to proclaim the
laws of its movement. The foresight indicated by the Manifesto was not chronological,
it was not a prophecy nor a promise, but a morphological prevision.




Beneath the noise of the passions over which our daily conversation extends
itself, beyond the visible movements of the persons who formed the material
at which the historians stop, beyond the juridical and political apparel
of our civil society, far enough from the meanings which religion and art
give to life, there remains, grows and develops the elementary structure
of society which supports all the rest. The anatomical study of this underlying
structure is economics. And as human society has several times changed, partially
or entirely, in its most visible exterior form, or in its ideological, religious
or artistic manifestations, we must first find the cause and the reason of
these changes, the only ones which historians relate, in the transformations
more hidden, and at first less visible, of the economic processus of this
structure. We must set ourselves to the study of the differences which exist
between the various forms of production when we have to deal with historic
epochs clearly distinct and properly designated; and when we have to explain
the succession of these forms, the replacing of one by the other, we must
study the causes of erosion, and of the destruction of the form which disappears;
and finally when we wish to understand the historic fact determined and concrete,
we must study the frictions and the contrasts which take their rise from
the different currents, that is to say, classes, their subdivisions and their
intersections which characterize a given society.




When the Manifesto declared that all history up to the present time has
been nothing but the history of class struggles and that these are the case
of all revolutions as also of all reactions, it did two things at the same
time, it gave to communism the elements of a new doctrine and to the communists
the guiding thread to discover in the confused events of political life the
conditions of the underlying economic movement.




In these last fifty years the generic foresight of a new historic era
has become for socialists the delicate art of understanding in every case
what it is expedient to do, because this new era is in itself in continual
formation. Communism has become an art because the proletarians have become,
or are on the point of becoming a political party. The revolutionary spirit
is embodied to-day in the proletarian organization. The desired union of
communists and proletarians is henceforth an accomplished fact.(10*) These
last fifty years have been the ever stronger proof of the ever growing revolt
of the producing forces against the forms of production. We "utopians"
have no other answer to offer than this lesson from events to those who still
speak of meteoric disturbances which, as they would have it, will disappear
little by little and will all resolve themselves into the calm of this final
epoch of civilization. And this lesson suffices.




Eleven years after the publication of the Manifesto, Marx formulated in
clear and precise fashion the directing principles of the materialistic interpretation
of history in the preface to a book which is the forerunner of "Capital."(11*)




"The first work which I undertook for the purpose of solving the
doubts which perplexed me was a critical re-examination of Hegel's Philosophy
of Law. The introduction to this work appeared in the German-French Year
Books, published in Paris in 1844.




My investigation ended in the conviction that legal relations and forms
of government cannot be explained either by themselves or by the so-called
general development of the human mind, but on the contrary, have their roots
in the conditions of man's physical existence, whose totality Hegel, following
the English and French writers of the eighteenth century, summed up under
the name of civil society; and that the anatomy of civil society must be
sought in political economy.




The study of the latter which I began at Paris was continued at Brussels
wither I had betaken myself in consequence of an order of Guizot expelling
me from France.




The general result which I arrived at and which, once obtained, served
as a guide for my subsequent studies, can be briefly formulated as follows:




In making their livelihood together men enter into certain necessary involuntary
relations with each other, industrial relations which correspond to whatever
stage society has reached in the development of its material productive forces.




The totality of these industrial relations constitutes the economic structure
of society, the real basis upon which the legal and political superstructure
is built, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond.




The method of producing the material livelihood determines the social,
political and intellectual life process in general.




It is not men's consciousness which determines their life; on the contrary,
it is their social life which determines their consciousness.




At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces
of society come into conflict with the old conditions of production or, to
use a legal expression, with the old property relations under which these
forces have hitherto been exerted. From forms of development of the productive
forces these relations turn into fetters of production. Then begins an epoch
of social revolution. With the change of the economic basis the whole vast
superstructure undergoes sooner or later a revolution.




In considering such revolutions one must constantly distinguish between
the industrial revolution, to be carefully posited scientifically, which
takes place in the economic conditions of production, and the legal, political,
religious, artistic or philosophical, in short ideological, forms wherein
men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. As little as we judge
an individual by what he himself thinks he is, just as little can we judge
such a revolutionary epoch by its own consciousness. We must rather explain
this consciousness out of the antagonisms of men's industrial life, out of
the conflict existing between the forces of social production and the relations
of social production.




A form of society never breaks down until all the productive forces are
developed for which it affords room. New and higher relations of production
are never established, until the material conditions of life to support them
have been prepared in the lap of the old society itself. Therefore mankind
always sets for itself only such tasks as it is able to perform; for upon
close examination it will always be found that the task itself only arises
where the material conditions for its solution are already at hand or are
at least in process of growth.




We may in broad outlines characterize the Asiatic, the antique, the feudal
and the modern capitalist methods of production as progressive epochs in
the economic evolution of society.




The industrial relations arising out of the capitalistic method of production
constitute the last of the antagonistic forms of social production; antagonistic
not in the sense of an individual antagonism, but of an antagonism growing
out of the social conditions of individuals.




But the productive forces which are developed in the lap of capitalistic
society create at the same time the material conditions needed for the abolition
of this antagonism. The capitalist form of society, therefore, brings to
a close this prelude to the history of human society."




Marx had some years before left the political arena and he did not return
to it until later with the International. The reaction had triumphed in Italy,
Austria, Hungary and Germany over the patriotic, liberal or democratic revolution.
the bourgeoisie on its side had overcome the proletarians of France and England.
The indispensable conditions for the development of a democratic and proletarian
movement suddenly disappeared. The battalion small in numbers indeed of the
Manifesto communists who had taken part in the revolution and who had participated
in all the acts of resistance and popular rebellion against reaction saw
its activity crushed by the memorable process of Cologne. The survivors of
the movement tried to make a new start at London, but soon Marx, Engels and
others separated themselves from the revolutionaries and retired from the
movement. The crisis was passed. A long period of repose followed. this was
shown by the slow disappearance of the Chartist movement, that is to say,
the proletarian movement of the country which was the spinal column of the
capitalist system. History had for the moment discredited the illusions of
the revolutionaries.




Before giving himself almost entirely to the long incubation of the already
discovered elements of the critique of political economy, Marx illustrated
in several works the history of the revolutionary period from 1848 to 1850
and especially the class struggles in France, showing thus that if the revolution
in the forms which it had taken on at that moment had not succeeded, the
revolutionary theory of history was not contradicted for all that.(12*) The
suggestions given in the Manifesto found here their complete development.




Later the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte(13*) was the first attempt
to apply the new conception of history to a series of facts contained within
precise limits of time. It is extremely difficult to rise for the apparent
movement to the real movement of history and to discover their intimate connection.
There are indeed great difficulties in rising from the phenomena of passion,
oratory, Parliaments, elections and the like to the inner social gearing
to discover in the latter the different interests of the large and small
bourgeois, of the peasants, the artisans, the laborers, the priests, the
soldiers, the bankers, the usurers and the mob. All these interests act consciously
or unconsciously, jostling each other, eliminating each other, combining
and fusing, in the discordant life of civilized man.




The crisis was passed and this was precisely true in the countries which
constituted the historic field from which critical communism proceeded. All
that the critical communists could do was to understand the reaction in its
hidden economic causes because, for the moment, to understand the reaction
was to continue the work of the revolution. The same thing happened under
other conditions and other forms 20 years later when Marx, in the name of
the International made in the "Civil War in France" an apology
for the Commune which was at the same time its objective criticism.




The heroic resignation with which Marx after 1850 abandoned political
life was shown again when he retired from the International after the congress
at the Hague in 1872. These two facts have their value for biography because
they give glimpses of his personal character. With him, in fact, ideas, temperament,
policy and thought were one and the same. But, on the other hand, these facts
have a much greater bearing for us. Critical communism does not manufacture
revolutions, it does not prepare insurrections, it does not furnish arms
for revolts. It mingles itself with the proletarian movement in the full
intelligence of the connection which its has, which it can have, and which
it must have, with all the relations of social life as a whole. In a word
it is not a seminary in which superior officers of the proletarian revolution
are trained, but is it neither more nor less than the consciousness of this
revolution and especially the consciousness of its difficulties.




The proletarian movement has grown in a colossal fashion during these
last thirty years. In the midst of numberless difficulties, through gains
and losses, it has little by little taken on a political form. Its methods
have been elaborated and gradually applied. All this is not the work of the
magic action of the doctrine scattered by the persuasive virtue of written
and spoken propaganda. From their first beginnings the communists had this
feeling that they were the extreme left of every proletarian movement, but
in proportion as the latter developed and specialized it became their necessity
and duty to assist, (through the elaboration of programmes, and through their
participation in the political action of the parties) in the various contingencies
of the economic development and of the political situation growing out of
it.




In the fifty years which separate us from the publication of the Manifesto
the specialization and the complexity of the proletarian movement have become
such that there is henceforth no mind capable of embracing it in its completeness,
of understanding it in its details and grasping its real causes and exact
relations. The single International, from 1864 to 1873, necessarily disappeared
after it had fulfilled its task. The preliminary equalization of the general
tendencies and of the ideas common and indispensable to all the proletariat,
and no one can assume or will assume to re-constitute anything like it.




Two causes, notably, contributed in a high degree to this specialization,
this complexity of the proletarian movement. In many countries the bourgeoisie
felt the need of putting an end in the interest of its own defense to some
of the abuses which had arisen in consequence of the introduction of the
industrial system. Thence arose labor legislation, or as it has been pompously
called social legislation. This same bourgeoisie in its own interest or,
under the pressure of circumstances has been obliged, in many countries to
increase the generic conditions of liberty, and notably to extend the right
of suffrage. These two circumstances have drawn the proletariat into the
circle of daily political life. They have considerably increased its chance
for action and the agility and suppleness thus acquired permit it to struggle
with the bourgeoisie in elective assemblies. And as the processus of things
determines the processus of ideas, this practical multiform development of
the proletariat is accompanied by a gradual development of the doctrines
of critical communism, as well in the manner of understanding history or
contemporary life as in the minute description of the most infinitesimal
parts of economics: in a word, it has become a science.




Have we not there, some ask, a deviation from the simple and imperative
doctrine of the Manifesto? Others again say, have we not lost in intensity
and precision what we have gained in extension and complexity?




These questions, in my opinion, arise from an inexact conception of the
present proletarian movement and an optical illusion as to the degree of
energy and revolutionary valor of the former movements.




Whatever be the concessions that the bourgeoisie can make in the present
economic order even it it be a very great reduction in the hours of labor,
it always remains true that the necessity of exploitation upon which the
whole present social order rests imposes limits beyond which capital as a
private instrument of production has no more reasons for existence. If a
concession to-day can allay one form of discontent in the proletariat, the
concession itself can do nothing less than to give rise to the need of new
and ever increasing concessions. The need of labor legislation arose in England
before the Chartist movement and it had its first successes in the period
which immediately followed the fall of Chartism. the principles and the reasons
of this movement in their cause and their effects were studied in a critical
manner by Marx in Capital and they afterwards passed, through the International,
into the programmes of the different socialist parties. Finally this whole
process, concentrating itself into the demand for eight hours, became with
the 1st of May an international marshaling of the proletariat, and a means
for estimating its progress. On the other hand, the political struggle in
which the proletariat takes part democratizes its habits; still more real
democracy takes birth which, with time, will no longer be able to adapt itself
to the present political form. Being the organ a society based on exploitation
it is constituted as a bureaucratic hierarchy, as a judicial bureaucracy
and a mutual aid society of the capitalists for the defense of their special
privileges, the perpetual income from the public debt, the rent of land and
the interest on capital in all its forms. Consequently the two facts, which
according to the discontented and the hypercritical seem to make us deviate
infinitely from the lines laid down by communism, become, on the contrary,
new means and new conditions which confirm these lines. The apparent deviations
from the revolution are, at bottom, the very thing which is hastening it.




Moreover, we must not exaggerate the significance of the revolutionary
faith of the communists of fifty years ago. Given the political situation
of Europe, if they had a faith, it was that they were precursors, and this
they have been; they hoped that the political conditions of Italy, Austria,
Hungary, Germany and Poland might approximate to modern forms, and this has
happened later, in part, and through other means; if they had a hope, it
was that the proletarian movement of France and England might continue to
develop. The reaction which intervened upset many things and stopped more
than one development which had already begun. It upset also the old revolutionary
tactic, and in these last years a new tactic has arisen. Therein lies all
the change.(14*)




The Manifesto was designed for nothing else than the first guiding thread
to a science and a practice which nothing but experience and time could develop.
It gives only the scheme and the rhythm of the general march of the proletarian
movement.




It is perfectly evident that the communist were influenced by the experience
of the two movements which they had before their eyes, that of France, and
especially the Chartist movement which the manifestation of April 10th was
soon to strike with paralysis. But this scheme does not fix in any invariable
fashion a tactic of war, which indeed had already been made frequently. The
revolutionists had often indeed explained in the form of catechism what ought
to be a simple consequence of the development of events.




This scheme became more vast and complex with the development and extension
of the bourgeois system. The rhythm of the movement has become more varied
and slower because the laboring mass has entered on the scene as a distinct,
political party, which fact changes the manner and the measure of their action
and consequently their movement.




Just as in view of the improvement of modern weapons the tactic of street
riots has become inopportune, and just as the complexity of the modern state
shows the insufficiency of a sudden capture of a municipal government to
impose upon a whole people the will and the ideas of a minority, no matter
how courageous and progressive, even so, on its side, the mass of the proletarians
no longer holds to the word of command of a few leaders, nor does it regulate
its movements by the instructions of captains who might upon the ruins of
one government raise up another. The laboring mass where it has developed
politically has made and is making its own democratic education. It is choosing
its representatives and submitting their action to its criticism. It examines
and makes its own the ideas and the propositions which these representatives
submit to it. It already knows, or it begins to understand according to the
situation in the various countries, that the conquest of political power
cannot and should not be made by others in its name, and especially that
it cannot be the consequence of a single blow. In a word it knows, or it
is beginning to understand that the dictatorship of the proletariat which
shall have for its task the socialization of the means of production cannot
be the work of a mass led by a few and that it must be, and that it will
be, the work of the proletarians themselves when they have become in themselves
and through long practice a political organization.




The development and the extension of the bourgeois system have been rapid
and colossal in these last fifty years. It already invades sacred and ancient
Russia and it is creating, not only in America, Australia and in India, but
even in Japan, new centers of modern production, thus complicating the conditions
of competition and the entanglements of the world market. The consequences
of political changes have been produced, or will not be long to wait for.
Equally rapid and colossal has been the progress of the proletariat. Its
political education takes each day a new step toward the conquest of political
power. The rebellion of the productive forces against the form of production,
the struggle, of living labor against accumulated labor, becomes every day
more evident. The bourgeois system is henceforth upon the defensive and it
reveals it decadence by this singular contradiction; the peaceful world of
industry has become a colossal camp in which militarism develops. The peaceful
period of industry has become by the irony of things the period of the continuous
invention of new engines of war.




Socialism has forced itself into the situation. Those semi-socialists,
even those charlatans who encumber with their presence the press and the
meetings of our party and who often are a nuisance to us, are a tribute which
vanity and ambitions of every sort render in their fashion to the new power
which rises on the horizon. In spite of the foreseen antidote which scientific
socialism is, the truth of which many people have not come to understand,
there is a group of quacks on the social question, all having some particular
specific to eliminate such or such a social evil: land nationalization, monopoly
of grains in the hands of the State, democratic taxes, statization of mortgages,
general strike, etc. But social democracy eliminates all these fantasies
because the consciousness of their situation leads the proletarians when
once they have become familiar with the political arena to understand socialism
in an integral fashion. The come to understand that they should look for
only one thing, the abolition of wage labor; that there is but one form of
society which renders possible and even necessary the elimination of classes,
-- the association which does not produce commodities, and that this form
of society is not longer the State, but its opposite, that is to say, the
technical and pedagogical administration of human society, the self-government
of labor. Behind the Jacobins are the gigantic heroes of 1793 and their caricatures
of 1848.




Social democracy! But is not that, say some, an evident attenuation of
the communist doctrine as it is formulated in the Manifesto in terms so ringing
and so decisive?




This is not the moment to recall that the phrase social democracy has
had in France many significations from 1837 to 1848, all of which were based
upon vague sentimentalism. Neither is it necessary to explain how the Germans
have been able in this nomenclature to sum up all the rich and vast development
of their socialism from the episode of Lassalle now passed over and transformed
up to our own days. It is certain that social democracy can signify, has
signified and signifies many things which have not been, are not, and never
will be, either critical communism or the conscious march toward the proletarian
revolution. It is also certain that contemporary socialism even in the countries
where its development is most advanced, carries with it a great deal of dross
which it throws off little by little along the road. It is certain also,
in fine, that this broad designation of social democracy serves as an escutcheon
and a buckler to many intruders. But here we need to fix our attention only
upon certain points of capital importance.




We must insist upon the second term of the expression in order to avoid
any equivocation. Democratic was the constitution of the Communist League;
democratic was its fashion of welcoming and discussing each new teaching;
democratic was its intervention in the revolution of 1848 and its participation
in the rebellious resistance against the invasion of reaction; democratic
finally was the very way in which the League was dissolved. In this first
type of our present parties, in this first cell so to speak of our complex
organism, elastic and highly developed, there was not only the consciousness
of the mission to be accomplished as precursor, but there was already the
form and the method of association which alone are suitable for the first
initiators of the proletarian revolution. It was not longer a sect; that
form was already, in fact, outgrown. The immediate and fantastic domination
of the individual was eliminated, what predominated was a discipline which
had its source in the experience of necessity and in the precise doctrine
which must proceed from the reflex consciousness of this necessity. It was
the same with the International, which appeared authoritarian only to those
who could not make their own authority prevail in it. It must be the same,
and it is so, in the working class parties and where this character is not
or cannot yet be marked, the proletarian agitation still elementary and confused
simple engenders illusions and is only a pretext for intrigues, and when
it is not so, then we have a passover where men of understanding touch elbows
with the madman and the spy; as for example the society of The International
Brothers which attached itself like a parasite to the International and discredited
it; or again the co-operative which degenerates into a business and sells
itself to capitalists; the labor party which remains outside politics and
which studies the variations of the market to introduce its tactic of strikes
into the sinuosities of competition; or again a group of malcontents, for
the most part social outcasts and little bourgeois, who give themselves up
to speculations on socialism considered as one of the phases of political
fashion. Social democracy has met all these impedimenta upon its way and
it has been obliged to relieve itself of them as it will have to do again
from one time to another. The art of persuasion does not always suffice.
Oftener it was necessary and it is necessary to resign ourselves and wait
until the hard school of disillusion serves to instruct, which it does better
than reasonings do.




All these intrinsic difficulties of the proletarian movement, which the
wily bourgeoisie often than not stirs up of itself and which it makes the
most of, form a considerable part of the internal history of socialism during
these last years.




Socialism has not found impediments merely in the general conditions of
economic competition and in the resistance of the political power, but also
in the very conditions of the proletarian mass and in the mechanism, sometimes
obscure although inevitable of its slow varied, complex movements, often
antagonistic and contradictory. That prevents many people from seeing the
increasing reduction of all class struggles to the single struggle between
the capitalists and the proletarianized workers.




Even as the Manifesto did not write, as the utopians did, the ethics and
the psychology of the future society, just so it did not give the mechanism
of that formation and of the development in which we find ourselves. It is
surely enough that these few pioneers have opened the road. We must walk
upon it to arrive at understanding and experience. Moreover man is distinctively
the experimental animal; that is why he has a history, or rather that is
why he makes his own history.




Upon this road of contemporary socialism which constitutes its development
because it is its experience, we have met the mass of the peasants.




Socialism which at first kept itself practically and theoretically to
the study and experience of the antagonisms between capitalists and proletarians
in the circle of industrial production properly so called, has turned its
activity toward that mass in which peasant stupidity blossoms. To capture
the peasants is the question of the hour, although the quintessential Schaeffle
long ago mobilized the anti-collectivist brains of the peasants for the defense
of the existing order. The elimination and the capture of domestic industry
into the capitalist form, the disappearance of small proprietorship, or its
lessening through mortgages, the disappearance of the communal domains, usury,
taxes and militarism, all this is beginning to work miracles even in those
brains assumed to be props of the existing order.




The Germans have been the pioneers in this field. They were brought to
it by the very fact of their immense expansion; from the cities they have
gone to the smallest centers and they thus arrive inevitably at the frontiers
of the country. Their attempts will be long and difficult; this fact explains,
excuses, and will excuse, the errors which have been and will be committed.(15*)
As long as the peasant shall not be gained over we shall always have behind
us this peasant stupidity which unconsciously repeats, and that because it
is stupid, the errors of the 18th Brumaire and the 2d of December. The development
of modern society in Russia will probably proceed on parallel lines with
this conquest of the country districts. When that country shall have entered
into the liberal era with all its imperfections and all its disadvantages,
with all the purely modern forms of exploitation and of proletarianization,
but also with the compensations and the advantages of the political development
of the proletariat, social democracy will no longer have to fear the threat
of unforeseen perils from without, and it will at the same time have triumphed
over the internal perils by the capture of the peasants.




The example of Italy is instructive. This country after having opened
the capitalist era dropped out for several centuries from the current history.
It is a typical case of decadence which can be studied in a precise fashion
from original documents in all its phases. It partly returned into history
at the time of the Napoleonic domination. It reconquered its unity and became
a modern state after the period of the reaction and conspiracies, and under
circumstances known to all, and Italy has ended by having all the vices of
parliamentarism, of militarism and of finance without having at the same
time the forms of modern production and the resulting capacity for competition
on equal terms. It cannot compete with countries where industry is more advanced
by reason of the absolute lack of coal and scarcity of iron, the lack of
technical ability, -- and it is waiting, or hoping now, that the application
of electricity may permit it to regain the time lost. It is this which gave
the impulse to different attempts from Biella to Schio. A modern state in
a society almost exclusively agricultural and in a country where agriculture
is in great part backward, it is that which gives birth to this general sentiment
of universal discontent.




Thence came the incoherence and the inconsistency of the parties, the
rapid oscillations from demagogy to dictatorship, the mob, the multitude,
the infinite army of the parasites of politics, the makers of fantastic projects.
This singular social spectacle of a development prevented, retarded, embarrassed
and thus uncertain, is brought out in bold relief by a penetrating spirit
which, if it is not always the fruit and the expression of a modern, broad
and real culture nevertheless bears within itself as the relic of an excellent
civilization the mark of great cerebral refinement. Italy has not been for
reasons easy to guess a suitable field for the indigenous formation of socialist
ideas and tendencies. The Italian Phillipe Buoanaroti, at first the friend
of the younger Robespierre, become the companion of Babeuf and later attempted
to re-establish Babeufism in France, after 1830. Socialism made its first
appearance in Italy at the time of the International, in the confused and
incoherent form of Bakunism; it was not, moreover, a labor movement, but
it was the work of the small bourgeois and instinctive revolutionists.(16*)
In these last years socialism has fixed itself in a form which almost reproduces
the general type of social democracy.(17*) Now in Italy the first sign of
life which the proletariat gave is in the shape of the rising of the Sicilian
peasants followed by other revolts of the same kind on the continent to which
others will perhaps succeed in the future. Is it not very significant?




After this incursion into the history of contemporary socialism we gladly
return to our precursors of fifty years ago, who put on record in the Manifesto
how they took possession of an advance post on the road of progress. And
that is true not merely of the theorizers, that is to say, Marx and Engels.
Both of these men would have exercised, under other circumstances and at
all times either by tongue or pen, a considerable influence over politics
and science such was the force and originality of their minds and the extent
of their knowledge even I they had never met on their way the Communist League.
But I am referring to all the "unknown" according to the exclusive
and vain jargon of bourgeois literature: -- of the shoemaker, Bauer, the
tailors, Lessner and Eccarius, the miniature painter, Pfaender, the watchmaker,
Moll,(18*) of Lochner, etc., and many others who were the first conscious
initiators of our movement. The motto, "Workingmen of all countries,
unite," remains their monument. The passage of socialism from utopia
to science marks the result of their work. The survival of their instinct
and of their first impulse in the work of to-day is the ineffaceable title
which these precursors have acquired to the gratitude of all socialists.




As an Italian, I return so much the more willingly to these beginnings
of modern socialism because for me, at least, this recent warning of Engels
is not without importance. "Thus the discovery that everywhere and always
political conditions and events find their explanation in economic conditions
would not have been made by Marx in 1845, but rather by Loria in 1886. He
has at least succeeded in impressing this belief upon his compatriots, and
since his book has appeared in French even upon some Frenchmen and he may
now go on inflated with pride and vanity as if he had discovered an epoch-making
historic theory until the Italian socialists have time to despoil the illustrious
Mr. Loria of the peacock feathers which he has stolen.(19*)




I would willingly close here, but more remains to be said.




On all sides and on all camps protests arise and objections are urged
against historical materialism. And some times these voices are swelled here
and there by newly converted socialists, socialist who are philosophical,
socialists who are sentimental and sometimes hysterical. Then reappears,
as a warning, the "question of the belly." Others devote themselves
to exercise of logical gymnastics with abstract categories of egoism and
altruism; for others again the inevitable struggle for existence always turns
up at the right moment.




Morality! But it is high time that we understand the lesson of this morality
of the bourgeois epoch in the fable of the bees by Mandeville, who was contemporary
with the first projection of classic economics.




And has not the politics of this morality been explained in classic phrases
that can never be forgotten by the first great political writer of the capitalist
epoch Machiavelli, who did not invent Machiavellism, but who was its secretary
and faithful and diligent editor. And as for the logical tourney between
egoism and altruism, has it not been in full view from the time of the Reverend
Malthus up to that empty, prolix and tiresome reasoner, the indispensable
Spencer? Struggle for existence! But could you wish to observe, study and
understand a struggle more important for us than the one which has its birth
and is taking on gigantic proportions in the proletarian agitation? Perhaps
you would reduce the explanation of this struggle which is developing and
working in the supernatural domain of society, which man himself has created
in the course of history, through his labor, through improved processes and
through social institutions, and which man himself can change through other
forms of labor, processes and institutions, -- you would perhaps reduce it
to the simple explanation of the more general struggle in which plant and
animals, and men themselves in so far as they are animals, are contending
in the bosom of nature.




But let us return to our subject.




Critical communism has never refused, and it does not refuse, to welcome
the multiple and valuable suggestions, ideological, ethical, psychologic
and pedagogic which may come from the knowledge and from the study of all
forms of communism Phales of Chalcedon down to Cabet.(20*) More than this,
it is by the study and the knowledge of these forms that the consciousness
of the separateness of scientific socialism from all the rest becomes developed
and fixed. And in making this study who is there who will refuse to recognize
that Thomas More was a heroic soul and a great writer on socialism? Who will
not find in his heart a large tribute of admiration for Robert Owen who first
gave to the ethics of communism this indisputable principle, that the character
and morals of men are the necessary result of the conditions in which they
live and the circumstances which surround them? And the partisans of critical
communism believe it is their duty, traversing history in thought, to claim
fellowship with all the oppressed, whatever may have been their destiny,
which was that of remaining oppressed and of opening the way after an ephemeral
success for the rule of new oppressors.




But the partisans of critical communism differentiate themselves clearly
on one point from all other forms or manners of communism, or of socialism,
ancient, modern or contemporaneous, and this point is of capital importance.




The cannot admit the that ideologies of the past have remained without
effect and that the past attempts of the proletariat have been always overcome
by pure chance, by pure accident, by the effect of a caprice of circumstances.
All these ideologies although they reflected in fact the sentiment directly
due to social antitheses, that is to say, the real class struggles, with
a lofty sense of justice and a profound devotion to an ideal, nevertheless
all reveal ignorance of the true causes against which they hurled themselves
by a an act of revolt spontaneous and often heroic. Thence their utopian
character. We can moreover explain why the oppressive conditions of other
epochs although they were more barbarous and cruel did not bring that accumulation
of energy, that concentration of force, or that continuity of resistance
which is seen to be realizing itself and developing in the proletariat of
our time. It is the change of society in its economic structure; it is the
formation of the proletariat in the bosom of the great industry and of the
modern state. It is the appearance of the proletariat upon the political
scene, -- it is the new things, in fine, which have engendered the need of
new ideas. Thus critical communism is neither moralizer, nor preacher, nor
herald, nor utopian -- it already holds the thing itself in its hands and
into the thing itself it has put its ethics and its idealism.




This orientation which seems harsh to the sentimentalists because it is
too true, too realistic and too real, permits us to retrace the history of
the proletariat and of the other oppressed classes which preceded it. We
see their different phases; we take account of the failures of Chartism,
of the Conspiracy of Equals and we explore still further back to attempts
at relief, to acts of resistance, and to wars, -- to the famous peasants'
war in Germany, to the Jacquerie and to Father Dolcino. In all these facts
and in all these events we discover forms and phenomena relating to the future
of the bourgeois in proportion as it tears to pieces, overthrows, triumphs
over and issues from the feudal system. We can do the same with the class
struggles of the ancient world but with less clearness. This history of the
proletariat and of the other oppressed classes, of the vicissitudes of their
struggles and their revolts, is already a sufficient guide to assist us in
understanding why the ideologies of the communism of other epochs were premature.




If the bourgeoisie has not arrived everywhere at the final stage of its
evolution, it surely has arrived in certain countries at its accomplishment.
In fact, in the most advanced countries it is subjecting the various older
forms of production, either directly or indirectly, to the action and to
the law of capital. And thus it simplifies, or it tends to simplify, the
different class struggles of former times, which then obscured each other
by their multiplicity, into this single struggle between capital which is
converting into merchandise all the products of human labor indispensable
to life and the mass of proletarians which sells its labor power, -- now
also become simple merchandise. The secret of history is simplified. It is
all prosaic. And just as the present class struggle is the simplification
of all other, so likewise, the communism of the Manifesto simplifies into
rigid and general theoretical formulas the ideologic, ethic, pyschologic
and pedagogic suggestion of the other forms of communism not by denying but
by exalting them. All is prosaic and communism itself partakes of this character,
it is now a science.




Thus there are in the Manifesto neither rhetoric nor protestations. It
does not lament over pauperism to eliminate it. It sheds tears over nothing.
The tears are transformed of themselves into a spontaneous revolutionary
force. Ethics and idealism conceit henceforth in this, to put the thought
of science at the service of the proletariat. If this ethics does not appear
moral enough for the sentimentalists, usually hysterical and silly, let them
go and borrow altruism from its high priest Spencer who will give a vague
and insipid definition of it, such as will satisfy them.




But, again, should the economic facto serve alone to explain the whole
of history. Historic factors! But that is an expression of empiricists or
ideologists who repeat Herder. Society is a complex whole or an organism
according to the expression of some who waste their time in discussions over
the value and the analogical use of this expression. This complexus has formed
itself and has changed several times. What is the explanation of this change?




Even long before Feuerbach gave a final blow to the theological explanation
of history (man makes religion and not religion man) the old Balzac(21*)
had made a satire of it by making men the puppets of God. And had not Vico
already recognized that Providence does not act in history from without?
And this same Vico, a century before Morgan, had he not reduced history to
a process which man himself makes through successive experimentation consisting
in the invention of language, religion, customs and laws? Had not Lessing
affirmed that history is an education of the human race? Had not Rousseau
seen that ideas are born from needs. Had not Saint Simon guessed when he
did not lose himself in the distinction between organic and inorganic epochs
the real genesis of the Third Estate, and did not his ideas translated into
prose make of Augustin Thierry a reconstructor of historical research? In
the first fifty years of this century and notably in the period from 1830
to 1850 the class struggles which the ancient historians and those of Italy
during the Renaissance had described so clearly, instructed by the experience
of these struggles in the narrow domain of their own urban republic had grown
and reached on both sides of the Channel greater proportions and an evidence
always more palpable. Born in the midst of the great industry, illuminated
by the recollection and by the study of the French revolution they have become
intuitively instructive because they found with more or less clearness and
consciousness their actual and suggested expression in the programmes of
the political parties: free exchange or tariffs on grain in England and so
on. The conception of history changed to the observer in France, on the right
wing as on the left wing of the literary parties, from Guizot to Louis Blanc
and to the modest Cabet. Sociology was the need of the time and if it sought
in vain its theoretic expression in August Comte, a belated scholastic, it
found its artist in Balzac who was the actual inventor of class psychology.
To put into the classes and into their frictions the real subject of history
and the movement of this in their movement, -- this was then on the point
of being studied and discovered, and it was necessary to fix a theory of
this in precise terms.




Man has made his history not by a metaphorical evolution nor with a view
of walking on a line of preconceived progress. He has made it by creating
his own conditions, that is to say, by creating through his labor an artificial
environment, by developing successively his technical aptitudes and by accumulating
and transforming the products of his activity in this new environment. We
have but one single history, which is actually made, and we cannot compare
real history, which is actually made, with another which is simply possible.
Where shall we find the laws of this formation and of this development. The
very ancient formations are not evident at first sight. But bourgeois society
because it is born recently and has not yet reach its full development, even
in all parts of Europe, bears within itself the embryonic traces of its origin
and its processus, and it puts them in full evidence in countries where it
is in process of birth before our eyes, as for example in Japan. In so far
as it is society which transforms all the products of human labor into commodities
by means of capital, society which assumes the proletariat or creates it
and which bears within itself the anxiety, the trouble and the uncertainty
of continuous innovations, it is born in determined times according to clear
methods which can be indicated although they may be varied. In fact in different
countries it has different modes of development. In Italy, for example, it
begins before all the others and then stops. In England it is the product
of three centuries of economic expropriation of the old forms of production,
or of the old proprietorship, to speak the language of jurists. In one country
it elaborates itself little by little combining itself with pre-existing
forces, as was the case in Germany, and it undergoes their influences through
adaptation; in another country it breaks its envelope and crushes out resistance
violently, as happened in France, where the great revolution gives us the
most intense and the most bewildering example of historic action that is
known, and thus forms the greatest school of sociology.




As I have already indicated this formation of modern or bourgeois history
has been summed up in rapid and masterly strokes in the Manifesto, which
has given its general anatomical profile with its successive aspects, the
trade guild, commerce, manufacture and the great industry and has also indicated
some of the organs and appliances of a derived and complex character, law,
political forms, etc. The elements of the theory which was to explain history
by the principle of the class struggle where already implicitly contained
in it.




This same bourgeois society which revolutionized the earlier forms of
production had thrown light upon itself and its processus in creating the
doctrine of its structure, economics. In fact it has not developed in the
unconsciousness which characterized primitive societies but in the full light
of the modern world beginning with the Renaissance.




Economics, as is known, was born by fragments, and its origin was associated
with that of the first bourgeoisie, which was that of commerce and the great
geographical discoveries, that is to say, it was contemporary with the first
and second phases of mercantilism. And it was born to answer special questions:
for example, is interest legitimate? Is it advantageous for states and for
nations to accumulate money? It continued to grow, it occupied itself with
the most complex sides of the problem of wealth: it developed in the passage
from mercantilism to manufacture and then more rapidly and more resolutely
in the passage from the latter to the great industry. It was the intellectual
soul of the bourgeoisie which was conquering society. It had already as discipline
almost defined its general lines on the eve of the French revolution; it
was the sign of the rebellion against the old forms of feudalism, the guild,
privilege, limitations of labor, that is to say it was the sign of liberty.
The theory of "natural right" which developed from the precursors
of Grotius to Rousseau, Kant, and the Constitution of 93, was nothing else
than the duplicate and the ideological complement of economics, to the extent
that often the thing and its complement are confounded in one in the mind
and in the postulates of writers; of this we have a typical example in the
Physiocrats.




In so far as it was a doctrine it separated, distinguished and analyzed
the elements and the forms of the processus of production, of circulation
and of distribution and reduced them all into categories: money, money capital,
interest, profit, land rent, wages, etc. It marched, sure of itself, accumulating
its analyses from Petty to Ricardo. The sole mistress of the field, it met
only rare objections. It started from two hypotheses which it did not take
the trouble to justify since they appeared so evident; namely, that the social
order which it illustrated was the natural order, and that private property
in the means of production was one and the same thing with human liberty;
all of which made wage labor and the inferiority of the wage laborers into
necessary conditions. In other terms, it did not recognize the historic character
of the forms which it studied. The antitheses which it met on its way in
its attempt at systematization, after several vain attempts it tried to eliminate
logically as was the case with Ricardo in his struggle against the income
from land rents.




The beginning of the nineteenth century is marked by violent crises and
by those first labor movements which have their immediate origin in the distress
attending lockouts. The ideal of the "natural order" is overthrown.
Wealth has engendered poverty. The great industry in changing all social
relations has increased vices, maladies and subjection. It has, in a word,
caused degeneration. Progress has engendered retrogression. What must be
done that progress may engender nothing else but progress, that is to say,
prosperity, health, security, education and intellectual development equal
for all? With this question Owen is wholly concerned and he shares with Fourier
and Saint Simon this characteristic that he no longer appeals to self-sacrifice
and to religion, and that he wishes to resolve and surmount the social antitheses
without diminishing the technical and industrial energy of man, but rather
to increase this. It is by this road that Owen became a communist and he
is the first who became so in the environment created by modern industry.
The antithesis rests entirely on the contradiction between the mode of production
and the mode of distribution. This antithesis must, then, be suppressed in
a society which produces collectively. Owen becomes utopian. This perfect
society must needs be realized experimentally and to this he devotes himself
with a heroic constancy and unequaled self-sacrifice bringing a mathematical
precision even into his thoughts of its details.




The antithesis between production and distribution once discovered, there
arose in England from Thompson to Bray a series of writers of a socialism
which is not strictly utopian, but which should be qualified as one-sided
for its object is to correct the manifest vices of society by as many appropriate
remedies.(22*)




In fact the first stage of all those who are on the road toward socialism
is the discovery of the contradiction between production and distribution.
Then, these ingenuous questions immediately arise: Why not abolish poverty?
Why not eliminate lockouts? Why not suppress the middle man? Why not favor
the direct exchange of products in consideration of the labor that they contain.?
Why not give the worker the entire product of his labor, etc. These demands
reduce the things, tenacious and resistant, of real life, into as many reasoning,
and they have for their object to combat the capitalist system as if it were
a machine from which one can take away or to which one can add pieces, wheels
and gearing.




The partisans of critical communism have broken definitely with all these
tendencies. They have been the successors and the continuers of classical
economics.(23*) What is the doctrine of the structure of present society?
No one can combat this structure in practice, in politics or in revolution
without first taking an exact account of its elements and its relations and
making a fundamental study of the doctrine which explains it. These forms,
these elements and these relations arise in certain historic conditions but
they constitute a system and a necessity. How can it be hoped to destroy
such a system by an act of logical negation and how eliminate it by reasoning?
Eliminate pauperism? But it is a necessary condition of capitalism. Give
the worker the entire product of his labor? But what would become of the
profit of capital, and where and how could the money expended in the purchase
of commodities be increased if among all the commodities which it meets and
with which it makes exchanges there were not a particular one which returns
to the buyer more than it costs him; and is not this commodity precisely
the labor power of the wage worker? The economic system is not a tissue of
reasonings but it is a sum and a complexus of facts which engenders a complex
tissue of relations. It is a foolish thing to assume that this system of
facts which the ruling class has established with great pains through the
centuries by violence, by sagacity, by talent and by science will confess
itself vanquished, will destroy itself to give way to the demands of the
poor and to the reasonings of their advocates. How demand the suppression
of poverty without demanding the overthrow of all the rest? To demand of
this society that it shall change its law which constitutes its defense is
to demand and absurd thing. To demand of this State that it shall cease to
be the buckler and the defense of this society and of this law is plunging
into absurdities.(24*) The one-sided socialism which without being clearly
utopian starts from the hypothesis that society admits of certain errata
without revolution, that is to say without a fundamental change in the general
elementary structure of society itself, is a mere piece of ingenuity. This
contradiction with the rigid laws of the process of things is shown in all
its evidence in Proudhon, who, reproducing without knowing it, or copying
directly, some of the one-sided English socialists, wished to arrest and
change history, armed with a definition and a syllogism.




The partisans of critical communism recognized that history has a right
to follow its course. The bourgeois phase can be outgrown and it will be.
But as long as it exists it has its laws. The relativity of these consists
in the fact that they grow and develop in certain determined conditions,
but their relativity is not simply the opposite of necessity, a mere appearance,
a soap-bubble. These laws may disappear and they will disappear by the very
fact of the change of society, but they do not yield to the arbitrary suggestion
which demands a change, proclaims a reform, or formulates a programme. Communism
makes common cause with the proletariat because in this resides the revolutionary
force which, bursts, breaks, shakes and dissolves the present social form
and creates in it, little by little, new conditions; or to be more exact,
the very fact of its movement shows to us that these new conditions are already
born.




The theory of the class struggle was found. It was seen to appear both
in the origins of the bourgeoisie (whose intrinsic processus was already
illustrated by the science of economics), and in this new appearance of the
proletariat. The relativity of economic laws was discovered, but at the same
time their relative necessity was understood. Herein lies the whole method
and justification of the new materialistic conception of history. Those deceive
themselves who, calling it the economic interpretation of history, think
they understand it completely. That designation is better suited, and is
only suited, to certain analytic attempts,(25*) which, taken separately and
in a distinct fashion on the one side the economic forms and categories,
and on the other, for example, law, legislation, politics, customs, -- proceed
to study the reciprocal influences of the different sides of life considered
in an abstract fashion. Quite different is our position. Ours is the organic
conception of history. The totality of the unity of social life is the subject
matter present to our minds. It is economics itself which dissolves in the
course of one process, to reappear in as many morphological stages, in each
of which it serves as a substructure for all the rest. Finally, it is not
our method to extend the so-called economic factor isolated in an abstract
fashion over all the rest, as our adversaries imagine, but it is, before
everything else, to form and historic conception of economics and to explain
the other changes by means of its changes. There lies our answer to all the
criticisms which come to us from all the domains of learned ignorance, not
excepting the socialists who are insufficiently grounded and who are sentimental
or hysterical. And we explain our position thus as Marx has done in his Capital,
not the first book of critical communism, but the last great book of bourgeois
economics.




At the moment when the Manifesto was written the historic horizon did
not go beyond the classic world, the scarcely studied German antiquities
and the Biblical tradition which had only lately been reduced to the prosaic
conditions of all profane history. Our historic horizon is now quite another
thing, since it extends to the Aryan antiquities and to the ancient deposits
of Egypt and Mesopotamia which precede all the Semitic traditions. And it
extends still further back into prehistory, that is to say, into unwritten
history. Morgan has given us a knowledge of ancient society, that is to say
a pre-political society, and the key to understand how from it came all the
later forms marked by monogamy, the development of the paternal family, the
appearance of property, first of the gens, then of the family, lastly individual,
and by the successive establishment of the alliances between gentes which
are the origin of the State. All this is illustrated by the knowledge of
the process of technique in the discovery and in the use of the means and
instruments of labor and by the understanding of the effect of this process
upon the social complexus, urging it in certain directions and making it
traverse certain stages. These discoveries may still be corrected at certain
points, notably by the study of the different specific fashions according
to which in different parts of the world the passage from barbarism to civilization
has been effected. But, henceforth, one fact is indisputable, namely, that
we have before our eyes the general embryogenic record of human development
from primitive communism to those complex formations as at Athens or at Rome
with their constitutions of citizens arranged in classes according to census
which not long ago constituted the columns of Hercules for research into
written tradition. The classes which the Manifesto assumed have been later
resolved into their process of formation and in this can already be recognized
the plexus of reasons and of different economic causes for the categories
of the economic science of our bourgeois epoch. The dream of Fourier to find
a place for an epoch of civilization in the series of long and vast process
has been realized. A scientific solution has been found for the problem of
the origin of inequality among men which Rousseau had tried to solve by arguments
of an original dialectic, relying however upon too few real data.




At two points, the extreme points for us, the human process is palpable.
One of these is the origin of the bourgeoisie, so recent and in the full
light of the science of economics; the other is the ancient formation of
society divided into classes, which marks the passage from higher barbarism
to civilization (the epoch of the State) to use expressions employed by Morgan.
All that is found between these two epochs is what has, up to this time,
formed the subject matter of the chroniclers, the historians properly so-called,
the jurists, the theologians and the philosophers. We must not be over-hasty
in tabulating it. At the very beginning we must understand the economics
relative to each epoch,(26*) in order to explain specifically the classes
which develop in it, avoiding hypothetical and uncertain data and taking
care not to carry over our own conditions into each epoch. For that, skilled
fingers are needed. Thus, for example, what the Manifesto says of the first
origin of the bourgeoisie proceeding from the serfs of the Middle Ages incorporated
little by little into the cities is not a general truth. This mode of origin
is peculiar to Germany and to the other countries which reproduce its process.
It is not the case either in Italy, nor in Southern France, nor in Spain,
which were the fields upon which began the first history of the bourgeoisie,
that is to say, of modern civilization. In this first phase are found all
the premises of the whole capitalist society as Marx informed us in a note
to the first volume of Capital.(27*) This first phase which reaches its perfect
form in the Italian municipalities forms the pre-historic background for
that capitalist accumulation which Marx has explained with so many characteristic
details in the evolution of England. But I will stop there.




The proletarians can have in view nothing but the future. That with which
all scientific socialists are primarily concerned is the present in which
are spontaneously developed and in which are ripening the conditions of the
future. The knowledge of the past is practically of use and of interest only
in so far as it throws light upon and explains the present. For the moment
it is enough to say that the partisans of critical communism fifty years
ago conceived the elements of the new and definite philosophy of history.
Soon this fashion of seeing will impose itself because it will be impossible
to think the contrary; and this discovery will have the fate of Columbus'
egg. And perhaps before and army so scientists has made an application of
this conception to the continuous narration of the whole history, the success
of the proletariat will have become such that the bourgeois epoch will appear
to all as something that must be left behind because it will nearly be so
in reality. To understand is to leave behind (Hegel).




When, fifty years ago, the Manifesto made of the proletarians, of the
unfortunates who excited pity, the predestined grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie,
the circumference of this burial place must have appeared very small to the
imagination of the writers who scarcely concealed in the gravity of their
style the idealism of their intellectual passion. The probable circumference
in their imagination then embraced only France and England, and it would
scarcely have touched the frontiers of other countries, for instance, Germany.
To-day the circumference appears to us immense by reason of the rapid and
colossal extension of the bourgeois form of production which by inevitable
reaction enlarges, makes universal and multiplies the movement of the proletariat
and immensely expands the scene upon which is projected the picture of the
coming communism. The burial place extends as far as the eye can reach. The
more productive forces this magician calls forth, the more he excites and
prepares forces that must rebel against himself.




All those who were communists ideological, religious and utopian, or even
prophetic and apocalyptic in the past have always believed that the reign
of justice, equality and happiness was destined to have the world for its
theatre. To-day the word is invaded by civilization and everywhere is developing
that society which lives upon class antagonisms and class domination, the
form of bourgeois production (Japan may serve us for an example.) The co-existence
of the two nations in one and the same state, which the divine Plato had
already described, is perpetuated. The earth will not be won over to communism
to-morrow. But as the confines of the bourgeois world enlarge, more numerous
are those who enter into it, abandoning and leaving behind the lower forms
of production, -- and thus the attempt of communism gains in firmness and
precision. especially because in the domain and struggle of competition,
the deviations due to conquest and colonization are diminishing. The proletarian
International, while embryonic in the Communist League of fifty years ago,
henceforth becomes Interoceanic and it affirms on the first of very May that
the proletarians of the whole word are really and actively united. The future
grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie and their descendants to many generations
will ever remember the date of the Communist Manifesto.




NOTES




1. I refer to that form which the Manifesto designates ironically
under the name of "German or 'True' Socialism." This paragraph,
which is unintelligible for those who are not well versed in the German philosophy
of that epoch, notably in certain of its tendencies marked by acute degeneracy,
has, with good reason, been surpressed in the Spanish translation.




2. It is better to use the expression "democratic socialization of
the means of production" than that of "collective property"
because the latter implies a certain theoretical error in that, to begin
with, it substitutes for the real economic fact a juridical expression and
moreover in the mind of more than one it is confused with the increase of
monopolies, with the increasing statization of public utilities and with
all the other fantasmagoria of the ever recurring State socialism, the whole
effect of which is to increase the economic means of oppression in the hands
of the oppressing class.




3. Twenty-five octavo pages in the original edition (London, February,
1848) for a copy of which I am indebted to the special kindness of Engels.
I should say here in passing that I have resisted the temptation to affix
any bibliographical notes, references and citations, for I should then have
been making a work of scholarship, or a book, rather than a simple essay.
I hope the reader will take my word for it that there are in this essay no
allusions, or statements of fact or opinion, which I could not substantiate
with authorities.




4. The "Umrisse zu einer Kritik der National-oekonomie" appeared
in the German-French Year Book, Paris, 1844, pp. 85-114; and his book
on The Condition of the Working Class in England at Leipzig in 1845.




5. In these last years many jurists have thought they found in the re-adjustment
of the civil Code a practical means for ameliorating the condition of the
proletariat. But why have they not asked the pope to become the head of the
free thought league? The most delightful of these is that Italian author
who occupying himself with the class struggle asks that by the side of the
code which establishes the rights of capital another be elaborated which
should guarantee the rights of labor.




6. This development has been given in Marx's Capital which can
be considered as a philosophy of history.




7. It was not until after the publication of the Italian edition of this
essay that I had at may disposal for some months a complete collection of
the Neue Rheinische Zeitung for which I owe hearty thanks to the Partei-Archiv
of Berlin. The impression derived from this reading surpasses expectation.
It is desirable either that this journal which now has become very rare,
be reprinted entire or that the most important articles and letters in it
be reproduced.




8. Misere de la Philosophie, by Karl Marx, Paris and Brussels,
1847; new edition, Paris, Giard and Briere, 1896.




9. This is made up of articles which appeared in 1849 in the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung and which reproduced the lectures given by Marx to the German
Workingmen's Circle of Brussels in 1847. It has since been published as a
propaganda leaflet.




10. See Chapter II of the Manifesto.




11. Zür Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Berlin, 1859, pp.
IV-VI of the preface. (Instead of retranslating this extract from the French
I have availed myself of the assistance of Comrade Hitch, who has translated
direct from the German of Marx.




12. These articles which appeared in the Neue Rheinische Politischokonomische
Review, Hamburg, 1850, have recently been brought together into a pamphlet
by Engels (Berlin, 1895) under the title of Die Klassenkampfe in Frankreich
1848 bis 1850. This little work has a preface by Engels.




13. Appeared for the first time in New York in 1852 in a review. Several
editions have since been made in Germany. A French translation appeared in
1891 published by Delory, Lille.




14. In the preface to the Class Struggle in France in 1848-50 and
elsewhere Engels treated fundamentally the objective development of the new
revolutionary tactic. (It is well to remember that the first Italian edition
of this essay appeared June 18th, and the second, October 15, 1895.




15. In my opinion this is the case in France. The recent discussions of
the agrarian programme submitted to the deliberations of the social democracy
in Germany confirm the reasons which I have indicated.




16. It was otherwise in Germany. After 1830 socialism was imported there
and became a current literature; it underwent philosophical alterations of
which Gruen was the typical representative. But already before the new doctrine
socialism had received a characteristic imprint which was proletarian, thanks
to the propaganda and the writings of Weitling. As Marx said in 1844 in the
Paris Vorwaerts, "it was the giant in the cradle."




17. It is what many people call Marxism. Marxism is and remains a doctrine.
Parties can draw neither their name nor the justification from a doctrine.
"I am no Marxist" said -- guess who? Marx himself.




18. It is he who established the first relations between Marx and the
League and who served as the intermediary in the publication of the Manifesto.
He fell in the insurrection of 1849 at Murg.




19. Marx's Capital, Vol. III, Hamburg, 1894, pp. xix-xx. The date
of 1845 refers principally to the book Die heilige Familie, Frankfort,
1845, which was produced in collaboration by Marx and Angels. This book is
indispensable to an understanding of the theoretical origin of historical
materialism.




20. I stop with Cabet who lived at the epoch of the Manifesto.
I do not think I ought to go as far as the sporadic forms of Bellamy and
Hertzka.




21. The Balzac of the 17th century.




22. It is these writers whom Menger thought he had discovered as the authors
of scientific socialism.




23. It is for this reason that certain critics, Wieser for example, propose
to abandon Ricardo's theory of value because it leads to socialism.




24. Thus there arises notably in France the illusion of a social monarchy
which, succeeding the liberal epoch, should solve harmoniously what is called
the social question. This absurdity reproduces itself in infinite varieties
of socialism of the pulpit and State socialism. To the different forms of
ideological and religious utopianism is joined a new form of bureaucratic
and fiscal utopianism, the Utopia of the idiots.




25. For example in the essays of Th. Rogers.




26. Who would have thought a few years ago of the discovery and the authentic
interpretation of an ancient Babylonian law?




27. Note 189, p. 740, of the 3rd German edition.




Part 2:




Historical materialism




I




This class of studies, like many others, but this more than any other,
is confronted with a great difficulty, indeed an irksome hindrance, in that
vice of minds educated by literary methods alone which is ordinarily called
verbalism. This bad habit creeps into and spreads itself through all domains
of knowledge; but in studies which relate to the so-called moral world, that
is to say, to the historico-social complexus, it very often happens that
the cult and the dominion of words succeed in corrupting and blotting out
the real and living sense of things.




In the field where a long observation, repeated experiences, the certain
use of improved instruments, the general or partial application of the calculus
have resulted in putting the mind into a constant and methodical relation
with things and their variations, as in the natural sciences properly so-called
-- there the myth and superstition of words are left behind and vanquished;
there the questions of terminology no longer have more than the secondary
value of pure convention. In the study of human relations and actions, on
the contrary, the passions, the interests, the prejudices of school, sect,
class and religion, the literary abuse of the traditional means of representing
thought, and scholasticism, ever vanquished and always reborn, conceal the
actual things, or transform them involuntarily into terms, into words, into
abstract and conventional fashions of speech.




We must, first of all, take account of this difficulty when we use the
expression or the formula "materialistic conception of history."
Many have imagined, do imagine, and will imagine that it is possible and
convenient to penetrate into the sense of the phrase by the simple analysis
of the words which compose it instead of arriving at it from the context
of an explanation, from the genetic study of the formation of the doctrine,(1*)
or from the polemical writings in which its partisans refute the objections
of its opponents. Verbalism tends always to shut itself up in purely formal
definitions; it gives rise in the minds to this erroneous belief, that it
is an easy thing to reduce into terms and into simple and palpable expressions
the agitated and immense complexus of nature and history and that it is easy
to picture the multiform and complicated interlacings of causes and effects;
in clearer terms, it obliterates the meaning of the problems because it sees
in them nothing but questions of nomenclature.




If, moreover, it then happens that verbalism finds a support in certain
theoretical hypotheses, for example, that matter indicates something which
is below or opposed to another higher or nobler thing which is called spirit;
or if it happens to be at one with that literary habit which opposes the
word materialism, understood in a disparaging sense, to all that, in a word,
is called idealism, that is to say, to the sum total of the anti-egoistic
inclinations and acts; then our embarrassment is extreme! Then we are told
that in this doctrine it is attempted to explain the whole of man by the
mere calculation of his material interests and that no value whatever is
allowed to any ideal interest. The inexperience, the incapacity and the haste
of certain partisans and propagandists of this doctrine have also been a
cause of these confusions. In their eagerness to explain to others what they
themselves only half understand, at a time when the doctrine itself is only
in its beginnings and still has need of many developments, they have believed
they could apply it, such as it was, to whatever historic fact they were
considering, and they have almost reduced it to tatters, exposing it thus
to the easy criticism and the ridicule of people on the watch for scientific
novelties, and other idle persons of the same type.




Since it has been my privilege in these first pages simply to rebut these
prejudices (in a preliminary fashion) and unmask the intentions and the tendencies
underlying them, it must be remembered that the meaning of this doctrine
ought, before all else, to be drawn from the position which it takes and
occupies with regard to the doctrines against which it is in reality opposed,
and particularly with regard to the ideologies of every sort; -- that the
proof of its value consists exclusively in the more suitable and more appropriate
explanation of the succession of human events which is derived from it; --
that this doctrine does not imply a subjective preference for a certain quality
or a certain sum of human interests opposed by free choice to other interests,
but that it merely affirms the objective coordination and subordination of
all interests in the development of all society; and this it affirms, thanks
to that genetic processus which consists in going from the conditions to
the conditioned, from the elements of formation to the things formed.




Let the verbalists reason as they like over the value of the word matter
in so far as it implies or recalls a metaphysical conception, or in so far
as it is the expression of the last hypothetical substratum of experience.
We are not here in the domain of physics, chemistry or biology; we are only
searching for the explicit conditions of human association in so far as it
is no longer simply animal. It is not for us to support our inductions or
our deductions upon the data of biology, but, on the contrary, to recognize
before all else the peculiarities of human association, which form and develop
through the succession and the growing perfection of the activity of man
himself in given and variable conditions, and to find the relations of co-ordination
and subordination of the needs which are the substratum of will and action.
It is not proposed to discover an intention nor to formulate a criticism;
it is merely the necessity arising from the facts that must be put in evidence.




And as men, not by free choice, but because they could not act otherwise,
satisfy first certain elementary needs, which, in their turn, give rise to
others in their upward development, and as for the satisfaction of their
needs, whatever they may be, they invent and employ certain means and certain
tools and associate themselves in certain definite fashions, the materialism
of historical interpretation is nothing else than an attempt to reconstruct
by thought with method the genesis and the complexity of the social life
which develops through the ages. The novelty of this doctrine does not differ
from that of all the other doctrines which after many excursions through
the domains of the imagination have finally arrived, very painfully, at reaching
the prose of reality and halting there.




II




There is a certain affinity, apparently at least, between that formal
vice of verbalism and another defect of the mind, whose origins may, however,
be varied. In consideration of some of its most common and popular effects
I will call it phraseology, although this word is not an exact expression
of the thing and does not set forth its origin.




For long centuries men have written on history, have explained it, have
illustrated it. The most varied interests, from the interests more immediately
practical to the interests purely esthetic, have moved different writers
to conceive and to execute this type of composition. These different types
have always taken birth in different countries long after the origins of
civilization, of the development of the state and of the passage from the
primitive communist society to the society which rests upon class differences
and class antagonisms. The historians, even if they have been as artless
as Herodotus, were always born and formed in a society having nothing ingenuous
in it, but very complicated and complex, and at a time when the reasons for
this complication and complexity were unknown and their origins forgotten.
This complexity, with all the contrasts which it bears within itself and
which it reveals later and makes burst forth in its various vicissitudes,
stood forth before the narrators as something mysterious and calling for
an explanation, and if the historian wished to give some sequence and a certain
connection to the things narrated, he was obliged to add certain general
views to the simple narration. From the jealousy of the gods of Father Herodotus
to the environment of M. Taine, an infinite number of concepts serving as
means of explanation and as complements to the things related have been imposed
upon the narrators by the natural voices of their immediate thought. Class
tendencies, religious ideas, popular prejudices, influences or imitations
of a current philosophy, excursions of imagination and a desire to give an
artistic appearance to facts known only in a fragmentary fashion, all these
causes and other analogous causes have contributed to form the substratum
of the more or less artless theory of events which is implicitly at the bottom
of the narration, or which serves at least to flavor and adorn it. Whether
men speak of chance or of destiny, whether they appeal to the providential
direction of human events or adhere to the word and concept of chance, the
only divinity left in the rigid and often coarse conception of Machiavelli,
or whether they speak, as is frequent enough at the present time, of the
logic of events, all these conceptions were and are effects and results of
ingenuous thought, of immediate thought, of thought which cannot justify
to itself its course, and its products, either by the paths of criticism
or by the methods of experience. To fill up with conventional causes (e.g.,
chance) or with a statement of theoretical plausibility (e.g., the inevitable
course of events which sometimes is confused in the mind with the notion
of progress the gaps of our knowledge as to the fashion in which things have
been actually produced by their own necessity without care for our free win
and our consent, that is the motive and the result of this popular philosophy,
latent or explicit, in the chroniclers, which by reason of its superficial
character dissolves as soon as scientific criticism appears.




In all these concepts and all these imaginings which in the light of criticism
appear as simple provisional devices and effects of an unripe thought, but
which often seem to "cultured people" the non plus ultra of intelligence
-- in all these a great part of the human processus is revealed and reflected;
and, consequently. We should not consider them as gratuitous inventions nor
as products of a momentary illusion. They are a part and a moment in the
development of what we call the human mind. If later it is observed that
these concepts and these imaginings are mingled and confounded in the accepted
opinions of cultured people, or of those who pass for such, they make up
an immense mass of prejudices and they constitute an impediment which ignorance
opposes to the clear and complete vision of the real things. These prejudices
turn up again as etymological derivations in the language of professional
politicians, of so-called publicists and journalists of every kind, and offer
the support of rhetoric to self-styled public opinion.




To oppose and then to replace this mirage of uncritical conceptions, these
idols of the imagination, these effects of literary artifice, this conventionalism
by the real subjects, or the forces which are positively acting -- that is
to say, men in their various and diversified social relations -- this is
the revolutionary enterprise and the scientific aim of the new doctrine which
renders objective and I might say naturalizes the explanation of the historical
processus.




A certain definite nation, that is to say, not a certain mass of individuals,
but a plexus of men organized in such and such a fashion by natural relations
of consanguinity, or following such or such an artificial or customary order
of relationship and affinity, or by reason of permanent proximity; -- this
nation, on a certain circumscribed and limited territory, having such and
such fertility, productive in such and such a manner acquired through certain
definite forms by continuous labor; -- this nation, thus distributed over
this territory and thus divided and articulated by the effect of a definite
division of labor which is scarcely beginning to give birth to or which has
already developed and ripened such and such a division of classes, or which
has already disintegrated or transformed a whole series of classes; -- this
nation which possesses such and such instruments from the flint stone to
the electric light and from the bow and arrow to the repeating rifle, which
produces according to a certain fashion and shares its products conformably
to its way of producing; -- this nation, which by all these relations constitutes
a society in which either by habits of mutual accommodation or by explicit
conventions, or by acts of violence suffered and endured, has already given
birth, or is on the point of giving birth to legal-political relations which
result in the formation of the state; -- this nation, which by the organization
of the state, which is only a means for fixing, defending and perpetuating
inequalities, by reason of the antagonisms which it bears within itself,
renders continuously unstable the organization itself, whence result the
political movements and revolutions, and therefore the reasons for progress
and retrogression; -- there is the sum of what is at the bottom of all history.
And there is the victory of realistic prose over all the fantastic and ideological
combinations.




Certainly it requires some resignation to see things as they are, passing
beyond the phantoms which for centuries have prevented right vision. But
this revelation of realistic doctrine was not and is not designed to be the
rebellion of the material man against the ideal man. It has been and is,
on the contrary, the discovery of the principles and the motives which are
real and which belong to all human development, including all that we call
the ideal in positive conditions, determined by facts which carry in themselves
the reasons and the law and the rhythm of their own development.




III




But it would be a complete error to believe that the writers who narrate,
explain, or illustrate have themselves invented and given life to this enormous
mass of unripe concepts, imaginings, and explanations which, thanks to the
force of prejudice, concealed for centuries the real truth. It may happen,
and it certainly does happen, that some of these concepts are the fruit and
the product of personal views, or of literary currents formed in the narrow
professional circle of the universities and academies. The people in this
case are absolutely ignorant of them. But the important fact is that history
itself has put on these veils; that is to say, that the very actors and workers
of the historic events -- great masses of people, directing and ordering
classes, masters of state, sects or parties, in the narrowest sense of the
word, if we make exception for an occasional moment of lucid interval --
never had up to the end of the past century a consciousness of their own
work, unless it be through some ideological envelope which prevented any
sight of the real causes. Already at the distant epoch when barbarism was
passing over into civilization, that is to say, when the first discoveries
of agriculture, the stable establishment of a population upon a definite
territory, the first division of labor in society, the first alliances of
different gentes, gave the conditions in which developed property and the
state, or at least the city -- even then, at the epoch of all the first social
revolutions, men ideally transformed their work, seeing in it the miraculous
acts of gods and heroes. So much so that, while acting as they could and
as they must, granted the necessity and the fact of their relative economic
development, they conceived an explanation of their own work as if it did
not belong to them. This ideological envelope of human works has changed
since then more than once in form, in appearance, in combinations and in
relations in the course of the centuries, from the immediate production of
the ingenuous myths up to the complicated theological systems and to The
City of God of St. Augustine -- from the superstitious credulity in miracles
down to the bewildering miracles of the metaphysicians, that is to say, down
to the Idea which for the decadents of Hegelianism engenders of itself, in
itself, by its own disaggregation, the most incongruous variations of social
life in the course of history.




Now, precisely because the visual angle of ideological interpretation
has not been finally outgrown until very lately, and because it is only in
our days that a sum total of the real and really acting relations has been
clearly distinguished from the ingenuous reflections of myth and the more
artificial reflections of religion and metaphysics, our doctrine states a
new problem and carries within itself grave difficulties for whoever wishes
to fit it for providing a specific explanation of the history of the past.




The problem consists in this: that our doctrine necessitates a new criticism
of the sources of history. And I do not wish to be understood as speaking
exclusively of the criticism of documents in the proper and ordinary sense
of the word, because as for this we may content ourselves with what is delivered
to us ready made by the critics, the scholars, and the professional philologists.
But I would speak of that immediate source which is behind the so called
documents properly and which, before expressing itself and fixing itself
in these, resides in the spirit and in the form of the consciousness in which
the actors accounted to themselves for the motives of their own work. This
spirit, that is to say, this consciousness, is often inadequate to the causes
which we are now in a position to discover, from which it follows that the
actors seem to us enveloped, as it were, in a circle of illusions. To strip
the historic facts from these envelopes which clothe the very facts while
they are developing -- this is to make a new criticism of the sources in
the realistic sense of the word and not in the formal documentary sense.
It is, in short, to make react upon the knowledge of past conditions the
consciousness of which we are now capable, and thereby to reconstruct them
anew.




But this revision of the most direct sources, if it marks the extreme
limit of the historic self-consciousness which may be reached, may be an
occasion for falling into a serious error. As we place ourselves at a point
of view which is beyond the ideological views to which the actors in history
were indebted for a consciousness of their work and in which they often found
both the motives and the justification of their action, we may falsely believe
that these ideological views were a pure appearance, a simple artifice, a
pure illusion in the vulgar sense of the word. Martin Luther, like the other
great reformers, his contemporaries, never knew, as we know to-day, that
the Reformation was but an episode in the development of the Third Estate,
and an economic revolt of the German nation against the exploitation of the
Papal court. He was what he was, as an agitator and a politician, because
he was wholly taken up with the belief which made him see in the class movement
which gave an impulse to the agitation a return to true Christianity and
a divine necessity in the vulgar course of events. The study of remote effects,
that is to say, the increasing strength of the bourgeoisie of the cities
against the feudal lords, the increase of the territorial dominion of the
princes at the expense of the inter-territorial and super-territorial power
of the emperor and the pope, the violent repression of the movement of the
peasants and the more properly proletarian movement of the Anabaptists permit
us now to reconstruct the authentic history of the economic causes of the
Reformation, particularly in the final proportions which it took, which is
the best of proofs. But that does not mean that we are privileged to detach
the fact arrived at from the mode of its realization and to analyze the circumstantial
integrality by a posthumous analysis altogether subjective and simplified.
The inner causes, or, as would be said now, the profane and prosaic motives
of the Reformation, appear to us clearly in France, where it was not victorious;
clearly again in the Low Countries, where, apart from the differences of
nationality, the contrasts of economic interests are shown strikingly in
the struggle against Spain; very clearly again in England, where the religious
renovation realized, thanks to political violence, placed in full light the
passage to those conditions which are for our modern bourgeoisie the forerunners
of capitalism. Post factum, and after the tardy realization of unforeseen
consequences, the history of the real movements which were the inner causes
of the Reformation, in great part unknown to the actors themselves, will
appear in full light. But that the fact came about precisely as it did come
about, that it took on certain determined forms, that it clothed itself in
certain vestments, that it painted itself in certain colors, that it put
in movement certain passions, that it displayed a special degree of fanaticism
-- in these consist its specific character, which no analytic ability can
make otherwise than as it was. Only the love of paradox inseparable from
the zeal of the passionate popularizers of a new doctrine can have brought
some to believe that to write history it was sufficient to put on record
merely the economic moment (often still unknown and often unknowable), and
thereupon to cast to the earth all the rest as a useless burden with which
men had capriciously loaded themselves, as a superfluity, a mere trifle,
or even, as it were, something not existent.




From the fact that history must be taken in its entirety and that in it
the kernel and the husk are but one, as Goethe said of all things, three
consequences follow:




First, it is evident that in the domain of historico-social determinism,
the linking of causes to effects, of conditions to the things conditioned,
of antecedents to consequents, is never evident at first sight in the subjective
determinism of individual psychology. In this last domain it was a relatively
easy thing for abstract and formal philosophy to discover, passing above
all the baubles of fatalism and free will, the evidence of the motive in
every volition, because, in fine, there is no wish without its determining
motive. But beneath the motives and the wish there is the genesis of both,
and to reconstruct this genesis we must leave the closed field of consciousness
to arrive at the analysis of the simple necessities, which, on the one side,
are derived from social conditions, and on the other side are lost in the
obscure background of organic dispositions, in ancestry and in atavism. It
is not otherwise with historical determinism, where, in the same way, we
begin with motives religious, political, aesthetic, passionate, etc., but
where we must subsequently discover the causes of these motives in the material
conditions underlying them. Now the study of these conditions should be so
specified that we may perceive indubitably not only what are the causes,
but again by what mediations they arrive at that form which reveals them
to the consciousness as motives whose origin is often obliterated.




And thence follows indubitably this second consequences that in our doctrine
we have not to re-translate into economic categories all the complex manifestations
of history, but only to explain in the last analysis (Engels) all the historic
facts by means of the underlying economic structure (Marx), which necessitates
analysis and reduction and then interlinking and construction.




It results from this, in the third place, that, passing from the underlying
economic structure to the picturesque whole of a given history, we need the
aid of that complexus of notions and knowledge which may be called, for lack
of a better term, social psychology. I do not mean by that to allude to the
fantastic existence of a social psyche nor to the concept of an assumed collective
spirit which by its own laws, independent of the consciousness of individuals
and of their material and definable relations, realizes itself and shows
itself in social life. That is pure mysticism. Neither do I wish to allude
to those attempts at generalization which fill up treatises on social psychology
and the general idea of which is to transport and apply to a subject which
is called social consciousness the known categories and forms of individual
psychology. Nor again do I wish to allude to that mass of semi-organic and
semi-psychological denominations by the aid of which some attribute to the
social being, as Schaeffle does, a brain, a spinal column, sensibility, sentiment,
conscience, will, etc. But I wish to speak of more modest and more prosaic
things, that is to say, of those concrete and precise states of mind which
make us know as they really were the plebeians of Rome at a certain epoch,
the artisans of Florence at the moment when the movement of the Ciompi burst
forth, or those peasants of France within whom was engendered, to follow
Taine's expression, the "spontaneous anarchy" of 1789, those peasants
who finally became free laborers and small proprietors, or, aspiring to property,
transformed themselves rapidly from victors over the foreigner into automatic
instruments of reaction. This social psychology, which no one can reduce
to abstract canons because, in most cases, it is merely descriptive, this
is what the chroniclers, the orators, the artists, the romancers and the
ideologists of every sort have seen and up to now have conceived as the exclusive
object of their studies. In this psychology, which is the specific consciousness
of men in given social condition, the agitators, orators and propagandists
trust today, and to it they appeal. We know that it is the fruit, the outcome,
the effect of certain social conditions actually determined -- this class,
in this situation, determined by the functions which it fulfills, by the
subjection in which it is held, by the dominion which it exercises; and finally,
these classes, these functions, this subjection and this dominion involve
such and such a determined form of production and distribution of the immediate
means of life, that is to say, a determined economic structure. This social
psychology, by its nature always circumstantial, is not the expression of
the abstract and generic process of the self-styled human intellect. It is
always a specified formation from specified conditions. We hold this principle
to be indisputable, that it is not the forms of consciousness which determine
the human being, but it is the manner of being which determines the consciousness
(Marx).




But these forms of consciousness, even as they are determined by the conditions
of life, constitute in themselves also a part of history. This does not consist
only in the economic anatomy, but in all that combination which clothes and
covers that anatomy even up to the multicolored reflections of the imagination.
In other words, there is no fact in history which does not recall by its
origin the conditions of the underlying economic structure, but there is
no fact in history which is not preceded, accompanied and followed by determined
forms of consciousness, whether it be superstitious or experimental, ingenuous
or reflective, impulsive or self-controlled, fantastic or reasoning.




IV




I was saying a moment ago that our doctrine makes history objective and
in a certain sense naturalizes it, going from the explanation of the data,
evident at first sight, of the personalities acting with design, and of the
auxiliary conceptions of the action, to the causes and the motives of the
will and the action, in order to find thereupon the co-ordination of these
causes and of these motives in the pre-elementary processus of the production
of the immediate means of existence.




Now this term "naturalizing" has led more than one mind into
confusing this order of problems with another order of problems, that is
to say, into extending to history the laws and the manners of thinking which
have already appeared suitable to the study and explanation of the material
world in general and of the animal world in particular. And because Darwinism
succeeded in carrying, thanks to the principle of the transformation of species,
the last citadel of the metaphysical fixity of things, and in discerning,
in the organisms, phases, as it were, and moments of a real and proper natural
history, it has been imagined that it was a commonplace and simple enterprise
to borrow for an explanation of the future and the history of human life
the concepts, the principles and the methods of examination to which that
animal life is subjected which in consequence of the immediate conditions
of the struggle for existence is unfolding to topographical environments
not modified by the action of labor. Darwinism, political and social, has,
like an epidemic, for many years invaded the mind of more than one thinker,
and many more of the advocates and declaimers of sociology, and it has been
reflected as a fashionable habit and a phraseological current even in the
daily language of the politicians.




It seems at first sight that there is something immediately evident and
instinctively plausible in this fashion of reasoning, which it may be said
is principally distinguished by its abuse of analogy and by its haste in
drawing conclusions. Man is without doubt an animal, and he is linked by
connections of descent and affinity to other animals. He has no privileges
of origin or of elementary structure, and his organism is merely one particular
case of general physiology. His first immediate field was that of simple
nature not modified by work, and from thence are derived the imperious and
inevitable conditions of the struggle for existence, with the consequent
forms of adaptation. Thence are born races in the true and authentic sense
of the word; that is to say, in so far as they are immediate determinations
of black, white, yellow, woolly-haired, straight-haired, etc., and not secondary
historico-social formations, that is to say, peoples and nations. Thence
are born the primitive instincts of sociability and in life in promiscuity
arise the first rudiments of sexual selection.




But if we can reconstruct in imagination the primitive savage, by combining
our conjectures, it is not given us to have an empirical intuition of him,
just as it is not given us to determine the genesis of that hiatus, that
is to say, that break in continuity, thanks to which human life is found
detached from animal life to rise, in the sequel, to an ever higher level.
All men who live at this moment on the earth's surface and all those who,
having lived in the past, were the objects of any trustworthy observation,
are found, and were found, already sufficiently removed from the moment when
purely animal life had ceased. A certain social life with customs and institutions,
even if it be of the most elementary form that we know, that is to say, of
the Australian tribes, divided into classes and practising the marriage of
all the men of one class with all the women of another class, separates human
life by a great interval from animal life. If we consider the maternal gens,
of which the classic type, the Iroquois type, has, thanks to Morgan's work,
revolutionized prehistoric science, while giving us at the same time the
key to the origins of history properly so called, we have a form of society
already much advanced by the complexity of its relations. At that stage of
social life which, according to our knowledge, seems very elementary, that
is to say, in the Australian society, not only does a very complicated language
differentiate men from all other animals (and language is a condition and
an instrument, a cause and an effect of sociability), but the specialization
of human life, apart from the discovery of fire, is manifested by the use
of many other artificial means by which the needs of life are satisfied.
A certain territory acquired for the common use of a tribe, a certain art
of hunting -- the use of certain instruments of defense and attack and the
possession of certain utensils for preserving the things acquired -- and
then the ornamentation of the body, etc., all this means that at bottom this
life rests upon an artificial, although very elementary, basis, upon which
men endeavor to fix themselves and adapt themselves -- upon a basis which
is after all the condition of all further progress. According as this artificial
basis is more or less formed, the men who have produced it and who live in
it are considered more or less savage or barbarous. This first formation
constitutes what we may call pre-history.




History, according to the literary use of the word, namely, that part
of the human processus whose traditions are fixed in the memory, begins at
a moment when the artificial basis has been formed for a considerable length
of time. For example, the canalization of Mesopotamia gives us the ancient
pre-Semitic Babylonian state, while the extremely ancient Egyptian civilization
rests upon the application of the Nile to agriculture. Upon this artificial
basis, which appears in the extreme horizon of known history, lived, as now,
not shapeless masses of individuals, but organized groups whose organization
was fixed by a certain distribution of tasks, that is to say, of labor and
by consecutive methods of co-ordination and subordination. These relations,
these connections, these ways of living were not and are not the result of
the crystallization of customs under the immediate action of the animal struggle
for existence. What is more, they presuppose the discovery of certain instruments,
and, for example, the domestication of certain animals, the working of minerals
and even of iron, the introduction of slavery, etc., instruments and methods
of economy which have first differentiated communities from each other and
have subsequently differentiated the component parts of these communities
themselves. In other words, the works of men in so far as they live together
react upon the men themselves. Their discoveries, and their inventions, by
creating artificial ways of living, have produced not only habits and customs
(clothing, cooking of food, etc.), but relations and bonds of coexistence
proportioned and adapted to the mode of production and reproduction of the
means of immediate life.




At the dawn of traditional history economics is already operating. Men
are working to live, on a foundation which has been in great part modified
by their work and with tools which are completely their work. And from that
moment they have struggled among themselves to conquer each from the other
a superior position in the use of these artificial means; that is to say,
they have struggled among themselves whether as serfs and masters, subjects
and lords, conquered and conquerors, exploited and exploiters, both where
they have progressed and where they have retrograded and where they have
halted in a form which they have not been capable of outgrowing, but never
have they returned to the animal life by the complete loss of their artificial
foundation.




Historical science has, then, as its first and principal object the determination
and the investigation of this artificial foundation, its origin, its composition,
its changes and its transformations. To say that all this is only a part
and a prolongation of nature, is to say a thing which by its too abstract
and too generic character has no longer any meaning.




The human race, in fact, lives only in earthly conditions, and we cannot
suppose it to be transplanted elsewhere. Under these conditions it has found
from its very first beginnings down to the present day the immediate means
necessary for the development of labor, that is to say, for its material
progress as for its inner formation. These natural conditions were and they
are always indispensable to the sporadic agriculture of the nomads, who sometimes
cultivated the earth merely for the pasturage of animals, as well as for
the refined products of intensive modern horticulture. These earthly conditions,
precisely as they have furnished the different sorts of stones suited for
the fabrication of the first weapons, furnish now also, with coal, the elements
of the great industry; precisely as they gave the first laborers osiers and
willows to plait, they give now all the materials necessary to the complicated
technique of electricity.




It is not, however, the natural materials themselves which have progressed.
On the contrary, it is only men who progress, through discovering little
by little in nature the conditions which permit them to produce in more and
more complex forms, thanks to the labor accumulated in experience. This progress
does not consist merely in the sort of progress with which subjective psychology
is concerned that is to say, the inner modifications which would be the proper
and direct development of the intellect, the reasoning and the thought. Moreover,
this inner progress is but a secondary and derived product, in proportion
as there is already a progress realized in the artificial foundation which
is the sum of the social relations resulting from the forms and the distributions
of labor. It is, then, a meaningless affirmation to say that all this is
but a simple prolongation of nature, unless one wishes to employ this word
in so generic a sense that it no longer indicates anything precise and distinct;
that which is not realized by the work of man.




History is the work of man in so far as man can create and improve his
instruments of labor, and with these instruments can create an artificial
environment whose complicated effects react later upon himself, and which
by its present state and its successive modifications is the occasion and
the condition of his development. There are, then, no reasons for carrying
back that work of man which is history to the simple struggle for existence.
If this struggle modifies and improves the organs of animals, and if in given
circumstances and methods it produces and develops new organs, it still does
not produce that continuous, perfected and traditional movement which is
the human processus. Our doctrine must not be confounded with Darwinism,
and it need not invoke anew the conception of a mythical, mystical or metaphorical
form of fatalism. If it is true in effect that history rests, before all
else, upon the development of technique, that is to say, if it is true that
the successive discovery of tools gives rise to the successive distributions
of labor, and therewith to the inequalities whose sum total, more or less
stable, forms the social organism, it is equally true that the discovery
of these instruments is at once the cause and the effect of these conditions
and of those forms of the inner life to which, isolating them by psychological
abstraction, we give the name of imagination, intellect, reason, thought,
etc. By producing successively the different social environment, that is
to say, the successive artificial foundations, man has produced himself,
and in this consists the serious kernel, the concrete reason, the positive
foundation of that which by various fantastic combinations and by a varied
logical architecture has suggested to the ideologists the notion of the progress
of the human mind.




Nevertheless, this expression of naturalizing history, which, understood
in too broad and too generic a sense, may be the occasion of the equivocations
of which we have spoken, when it is, on the contrary, employed with proper
precaution and in a tentative fashion, sums up briefly the criticism of all
the ideological views which, in the interpretation of history, start from
this hypothesis, that human work or activity are one and the same with free
will, free choice and voluntary designs.




It was easy and convenient for the theologians to carry back the course
of human events to a preconceived plan or design, because they passed directly
from the facts of experience to an assumed mind which ruled the universe.
The jurists, who first had occasion to discover in the institutions which
formed the object of their studies a certain guiding thread through the forms
which manifestly succeeded each other, carried over, as they still carry
over as cheerfully, the reasoning faculty which is their own duality, to
serve as an explanation for the whole vast social fabric, however complicated.
The men of politics, who naturally take their point of departure in this
datum of experience, that the officers of the state, whether by the acquiescence
of the subject masses or profiting by the antitheses of interests of the
different social groups, may set aims for themselves and realize them voluntarily
and in deliberate fashion -- these men are brought to see in the succession
of human events only a variation of these designs, these projects and these
intentions. Now our conception, while revolutionizing in their foundations
the hypotheses of the theologians, the jurists and the politicians, terminates
in this affirmation, that human labor and activity in general are not always
one and the same thing in the course of history with the will which acts
with design, with preconceived plans and with its free choice of means; that
is to say, that they are not one and the same thing with the reasoning faculty.
All that has happened in history is the work of man, but it was not, and
is not, with rare exceptions, the result of a critical choice or of a reasoning
desire. Moreover, it was and is through necessity that, determined by external
needs and occasions, this activity engenders an experience and a development
of internal and external organs. Among these organs we must include intelligence
and reason which also are the result and consequence of repeated and accumulated
experience. The integral formation of man in his historical development is
henceforth no longer a hypothetical datum nor a simple conjecture. It is
an intuitive and palpable truth. The conditions of the processus which engenders
a step of progress are henceforth reducible into a series of explanations;
and up to a certain point we have under our eyes the schedule of all historical
developments, morphologically conceived. This doctrine is the clear and definite
negation of all ideology, because it is the explicit negation of every form
of rationalism, understanding by this word this concept, that things in their
existence and their development answer to a norm, an ideal, a measure, an
end, in an implicit or explicit fashion. The whole course of human events
is a sum, a succession of series of conditions which men have made and laid
down for themselves through the experience accumulated in their changing
social life, but it represents neither the tendency to realize a predetermined
end nor the deviation of a first principle from perfection and felicity.
Progress itself implies merely that empirical and circumstantial notion of
a thing which is at present defined in our mind, because, thanks to the development
thus far realized, we are in a position to estimate the past and to foresee,
at least in a certain sense and in a certain measure, the future.




V




In this fashion a serious ambiguity is dissolved and the errors carried
with it are removed. Reasonable and well founded is the tendency of those
who aim to subordinate the sum total of human events in their course to the
rigorous conception of determinism. There is, on the contrary, no reason
for confusing this derived, reflex and complex determinism with the determinism
of the immediate struggle for existence which is produced and developed on
a field not modified by the continued action of labor. Legitimate and well
founded, in an absolute fashion, is the historical explanation which proceeds
in its course from the volitions which have voluntarily regulated the different
phases of life, to the motives and objective causes of every choice, discovered
in the conditions of environment, territory, accessible means of existence
and conditions of experience. But there is, on the contrary, no foundation
for that opinion which tends to the negation of every volition by consequence
of a theoretical view which would substitute automatism for voluntarism.
There is nothing in it, as a matter of fact, but a pure and simple conceit.




Wherever the means of production have developed, to a certain point, wherever
the artificial foundation has acquired a certain consistency, and wherever
the social differentiations and their resulting antitheses have created the
need, the possibility and the conditions of an organization more or less
stable or unstable, there, always and necessarily, appear premeditated designs,
political views, plans of conduct, systems of law and finally maxims and
general and abstract principles. In the circle of these products, and of
these derived and complex developments of the second degree, spring up also
the sciences and arts, philosophy and learning, and history as a literary
fashion of production. This circle is what the rationalists and the ideologists,
ignorant of its real foundations, have called, and call, in an exclusive
fashion, civilization. And, in fact, it has happened, and it happens, that
some men, and especially professional scientists, lay or clerical, have found,
and find, the means of intellectual livelihood in the closed circle of the
reflex and secondary products of civilization, and that they have been able
and are able consequently to submit all the rest to the subjective view which
they have elaborated under these conditions; that is, the origin and explanation
of all the ideologies. Our doctrine has definitely outgrown the visual angle
of ideology. The premeditated designs, the political views, sciences, systems
of law, etc., instead of being the means and the instrument of the explanation
of history, are precisely what require to be explained, because they are
derived from determined conditions and situations. But that does not mean
that they are pure appearances, soap bubbles. If they are things which have
been developed and derived, that does not imply that they are not real things;
and that is so true that they have been, for centuries, to the unscientific
consciousness, and to the scientific consciousness still on the way towards
its formation, the only ones which really existed.




But that is not all.




Our doctrine, like others, may lead to reverie and offer an occasion and
a theme for a new inverted ideology. It was born on the battlefield of communism.
It assumes the appearance of the modern proletariat on the political stage,
and it assumes that alignment upon the origins of our present society which
has permitted us to reconstruct in a critical manner the whole genesis of
the bourgeoisie. It is a doctrine revolutionary from two points of view:
because it has found the reasons and the methods of development of the proletarian
revolution which is in the making, and because it proposes to find the causes
and the conditions of development of all other social revolutions which have
taken place in the past, in the class antagonisms which arrived at a certain
critical point, by reason of the contradiction between the forms of production
and the development of the producing forces. And this is not all. In the
light of this doctrine what is essential in history is summed up in these
critical moments, and it abandons, momentarily at least, what unites these
different moments to the learned ministrations of the professional narrators.
As a revolutionary doctrine it is, before all else, the intellectual consciousness
of the actual proletarian movement in which, according to our assertion,
the future of communism is preparing long beforehand; so much so that the
open adversaries of socialism reject it as an opinion, which, under a scientific
mask, is only working out another utopia.




Thus it may happen, and that has already resulted, that the imagination
of people unfamiliar with the difficulties of historic research, and the
zeal of fanatics, find a stimulus and an opportunity even in historic materialism
for forming a new ideology and drawing from it a new philosophy of systematic
history, that is to say, history conceived as schemes or tendencies and designs.
And no precaution can suffice. Our intellect is rarely contented with purely
critical research; it is always attempting to convert into an element of
pedantry and into a new scholasticism every discovery of thought. In a word,
even the materialistic conception of history may be converted into a form
of argumentation for a thesis and serve to make new fashions with the ancient
prejudices like that of a history based on syllogisms, demonstrations and
deductions.




To guard against this, and especially to avoid the reappearance in an
indirect and disguised fashion of any form whatever of finality, it is necessary
to resolve positively upon two things: First, that all known historic conditions
are circumstanced, and second, that progress has thus far been circumscribed
by various obstacles and that for this reason it has always been partial
and limited.




Only a part, and, until recent times, only a small part of the human race,
has traversed completely all the stages of the processus by the effect of
which the most advanced nations have arrived at modern civil society, with
the advanced technical forms founded upon the discoveries of science and
with all the consequences, political, intellectual, moral, etc., which correspond
to this development. By the side of the English -- to take the most striking
example -- who, transporting European manners with them to New Holland, have
created there a center of production which already holds a notable place
in the competition of the world's market, there still live, like fossils
of prehistoric times, the Australian aborigines, capable only of disappearing,
but incapable of adapting themselves to a civilization which was not imported
among them, but next to them. In America, and especially in North America,
the series of events which have brought on the development of modern society
began with the importation from Europe of domestic animals and agricultural
tools, the use of which in ancient times gave birth to the slow moving civilization
of the Mediterranean; but this movement remained entirely inside the circle
of those descended from the conquerors and colonists, while the aborigines
are lost in the mass through the intermingling of races or perish and disappear
completely. Western Asia and Egypt, which already in very ancient times,
as the first cradle of all our civilization, gave birth to the great semi-political
formations which marked the first phases of certain and positive history,
have appeared to us for centuries as crystallizations of social forms incapable
of moving on of themselves to new phases of development. Upon them is the
age-long weight of the barbaric camp -- the dominion of the Turk. Into this
stiffened mass is introduced by secret ways a modern administration, and
in the name of business interests the railroads and the telegraphs push in
-- bold outposts of the conquering European bank. All this stiffened mass
has no hope of resuming life, heat and motion except by the ruin of the Turkish
dominion, for which are being substituted in the different methods of direct
and indirect conquest the dominion and the protectorate of the European bourgeoisie.
That a process of transformation of backward nations or of nations arrested
in their march, can be realized and hastened under external influences, India
stands as a proof. This country, with its own life still surviving re-enters
vigorously under the action of England into the circulation of international
activity even with its intellectual products. These are not the only contrasts
in the historic physiognomy of our contemporaries. And while in Japan, by
an acute and spontaneous phenomenon of imitation, there has developed, in
less than thirty years, a certain assimilation of western civilization which
is already moving normally the country's own energies, the forcible law of
Russian conquest is dragging into the circle of modern industry, and even
into great industry, certain notable portions of the country beyond the Caspian,
as an outpost of the approaching acquisition to the sphere of capitalism
of Central Asia and Upper Asia. The gigantic mass of China appeared to us
but a few years ago as motionless in the hereditary organization of its institutions,
so slow is every movement there, while for ethnic and geographical reasons
almost all Africa remained impenetrable, and, it seemed, even up to the last
attempts at conquest and colonization, that it was destined to offer only
its borders to the process of civilization, as if we were still in the times
not even of the Portuguese, but of the Greeks and Carthaginians.




These differentiations of men on the track of written and unwritten history
seem to us easily explicable when they can be referred to the natural and
immediate conditions which impose limits upon the development of labor. This
is the case with America, which up to the arrival of the Europeans had but
one cereal, maize, and but one domestic animal for labor, the llama, and
we can rejoice that the Europeans imported with themselves and their tools
the ox, the ass and the horse, corn, cotton, sugarcane, coffee and finally
the vine and the orange tree, creating there a new world of that glorious
society which produces merchandise and which with an extraordinary swiftness
of movement has already traversed the two phases of the blackest slavery
and the most democratic wage system. But where there is a real halt and even
an attested retrogression, as in Western Asia, in Egypt, in the Balkan Peninsula
and in Northern Africa -- and this arrest cannot be attributed to the change
of natural conditions -- we find the problem before us which is awaiting
its solution from the direct and explicit study of the social structure studied
in the internal modes of its development, as in the interlacings and complications
of the different nations upon that field which is ordinarily called the scene
of historic struggles.




This same civilized Europe, which by the continuity of its tradition,
presents the most complete diagram of its processus, so much so that upon
this model have been conceived and constructed, thus far, all the systems
of historical philosophy, this Western and Central Europe, which produced
the epoch of the bourgeoisie and has sought and is seeking to impose that
form of society upon the whole world by different modes of conquest, direct
or indirect -- this Europe is not completely uniform in the degree of its
development, and its various agglomerations, national, local and political,
appear disturbed, as it were, over a decidedly sloping ladder. Upon these
differences depend the conditions of relative superiority and inferiority
of one country to another and the reasons, more or less advantageous or disadvantageous,
for economic exchange; and thereon have depended, and still depend, not only
the frictions and the struggles, the treaties and the wars, but also everything
that with more or less precision the political writers have been able to
relate to us since the Renaissance, and certainly with increasing evidence,
from Louis XIV and Colbert to our own time.




This Europe in itself is highly variegated. Here is the consummate flower
of industrial and capitalist production, namely, England, while at other
points survives the artisan, vigorous or rickety, at Paris and at Naples,
to grasp the fact in its extreme points. Here the land is almost industrialized,
as in England and elsewhere vegetates, in various traditional forms, the
stupid peasant, as in Italy and in Austria, and in the latter country more
than in the former. In one country the political life of the state -- suited
to the prosaic consciousness of a bourgeoisie which knows its business because
it has conquered the space that it occupies -- is exerted in the surest and
most open fashion of an explicit class domination (it will be understood
that I am speaking of France). Elsewhere, and particularly in Germany, the
old feudal customs, the hypocrisy of Protestantism and the cowardice of a
bourgeoisie which exploits favorable economic circumstances without bringing
to them either intelligence or revolutionary courage, strengthen the existing
state by preserving the lying appearances of an ethical mission to be accomplished.
(With how many unpalatable sauces this state ethics, Prussian into the bargain,
has been served up by the heavy and pedantic German professors!) Here and
there modern capitalist production is edging its way into countries which
from other points of view do not enter into our movement and especially into
its political side, as is the case with unhappy Poland; or again this form
only penetrates indirectly, as in the Slavonic countries. But now comes the
sharpest contrast, which seems destined to put under our eyes, as in an epitome,
all the phrases, even the most extreme, of our history.




Russia could not have advanced, as it is now advancing, toward the great
industry, without drawing from Western Europe, and especially from our charming
French Chauvinsim, that money which she would in vain have sought within
her own borders, that is to say, from the conditions of her obese territorial
mass, where vegetate in ancient economic forms fifty million peasants. Russia,
in order to become an economic modern society ripening the conditions of
a corresponding political revolution, and preparing the means which will
facilitate the addition of a large part of Asia to the capitalist movement,
has been led to destroy the last relics of agrarian communism (whether its
origins be primitive or secondary) which had been preserved within herself
up to this point in such characteristic forms and on so large a scale. Russia
must capitalize herself, and to this end she must, to start with, convert
land into merchandise capable of producing merchandise, and at the same time
transform into miserable proletarians the ex-communists of the land.




And, on the contrary, in Western and Central Europe we find ourselves
at the opposite point of the series of development which has scarcely begun
in Russia. Here, with us, where the bourgeoisie, with varied fortunes and
triumphing over such a variety of difficulties, has already traversed so
many stages of its development, it is not the recollection of primitive or
secondary communism, which scarcely survives through learned combinations
in the heads of scholars, but the very form of bourgeois production, which
engenders in the proletarians the tendency to socialism, which presents itself
in its general outlines as an indication of a new phase of history and not
as the repetition of what is inevitably perishing in the Slavonic countries
under our eyes.




Who could fail to see in these illustrations, which I have not sought
out, but which have come almost by chance, and which can be indefinitely
prolonged in a volume of economic-political geography of the present world,
the evident proof of the manner in which historic conditions are all circumstanced
in the forms of their development. Not only races and peoples, nations and
states, but parts of nations and various regions of states, even orders and
classes, are found, as it were, upon so many rounds of a very long ladder,
or, rather, upon the various points of a complicated and slowly developing
curve. Historic time has not marched uniformly for all men. The simple succession
of generations has never been the index of the constancy and intensity of
the processus. Time as an abstract measure of chronology and the generations
which succeed one another in approximate periods give no criterion and furnish
no indication of law or of process. The developments thus far have been varied
because the things accomplished in one and the same unit of time were varied.
Between these varied forms of development there is an affinity or rather
a similarity of movements, that is, an analogy of type, or again an identity
of form; thus the advanced forms may by simple contact or by violence accelerate
the development of backward forms. But the important thing is to comprehend
that progress, our notion of which is not merely empirical, but always circumstanced
and thus limited, is not suspended over the course of human events like a
destiny or a fate, nor like a commandment. And for this reason our doctrine
cannot serve to represent the whole history of the human race in a unified
perspective which repeats, mutatis mutandis, the historic philosophy from
thesis to conclusion, from St. Augustine to Hegel, or, better, from the prophet
Daniel to M. De Rougemont.




Our doctrine does not pretend to be the intellectual vision of a great
plan or of a design, but it is merely a method of research and of conception.
It is not by accident that Marx spoke of his discovery as a guiding thread,
and it is precisely for this reason that it is analogous to Darwinism, which
also is a method, and is not and cannot be a modern repetition of the constructed
or constructive natural philosophy as used by Shelling and his school.




The first to discover in the notion of progress an indication of something
circumstantial and relative was the genial Saint Simon, who opposed his way
of seeing to the doctrine of the eighteenth century represented by the party
of Condorcet. To that doctrine, which may be called unitary, equalitarian,
formal, because it regards the human race as developing upon one line of
process, Saint Simon opposes the conception of the faculties and of the aptitudes
which substitute themselves and compensate for each other, and thus he remains
an ideologist.




To penetrate the true reasons for the relativity of progress another thing
was necessary. It was necessary, first of all, to renounce those prejudices
which are involved in the belief that the obstacles to the uniformity of
human development rest exclusively upon natural and immediate causes. These
natural obstacles are either sufficiently problematical, as is the case with
races, no one of which shows the privilege of birth in its history, or they
are, as is the case in geographical differences, insufficient to explain
the development of the completely different historico-social conditions on
one and the same geographical field. And as the historic movement dates precisely
from the time when the natural obstacles have already been in great part
either vanquished or notably circumscribed, thanks to the creation of an
artificial field upon which it has been given to men to develop themselves
further, it is evident that the successive obstacles to the uniformity of
progress must be sought in the proper and intrinsic conditions of the social
structure itself.




This structure has thus far started in forms of political organization,
the object of which is to try to hold in equilibrium the economic inequalities;
consequently this organization, as I have said more than once is constantly
unstable. From the point where there is a known history, it is the history
of society tending to form the state, or having already constructed it completely.
And the state is this struggle, within and without, because it is, above
all, the organ and the instrument of a larger or smaller part of society
against all the rest of society itself, in so far as the latter rests upon
the economic domination of man over man in a more or less direct and explicit
fashion, according as the different degree of the development of production,
of its natural means and its artificial instruments, requires either chattel
slavery, or the serfdom of the soil, or the "free" wage system.
This society of antitheses, which forms a state, is always, although in different
forms and various modes, the opposition of the city to the country, of the
artisan to the peasant, of the proletarian to the employer, of the capitalist
to the laborer, and so on ad infinitum, and it always ends, with various
complications and various methods, in an hierarchy, whether it be in a fixed
scaffolding of privilege, as in the Middle Ages, or whether, under the disguised
forms of supposed equal rights for all, it be produced by the automatic action
of economic competition, as in our time.




To this economic hierarchy corresponds, according to various modes, in
different countries, in different times, in different places, what I may
call almost a hierarchy of souls, of intellects, of minds. That is to say,
that culture, which, for the idealists, constitutes the sum of progress,
has been and is by the necessities of the case very unequally distributed.
The greater portion of mankind, by the quality of their occupations, are
composed of individuals who are disintegrated, broken into fragments and
rendered incapable of a complete and normal development. To the economics
of classes and to the hierarchy of social positions corresponds the psychology
of classes. The relativity of progress is then for us the inevitable consequence
of class distinctions. These distinctions constitute the obstacles which
explain the possibility of relative retrogression, up to the point of degeneracy
and of the dissolution of an entire society. The machines, which mark the
triumph of science, become, by reason of the antithetic conditions of the
social plexus, instruments which impoverish millions and millions of artisans
and free peasants. The progress of technique, which fills the towns with
merchandise, makes more miserable and abject the condition of the peasants,
and in the cities themselves it further humbles the condition of the humble.
All the progress of science has served thus far to differentiate a class
of scientists and to keep ever further from culture the masses who, attached
to their ceaseless daily toil, are thus feeding the whole of society.




Progress has been and is, up to the present time, partial and one-sided.
The minorities which share in it call this human progress; and the proud
evolutionists call this human nature which is developing. All this partial
progress, which has thus far developed upon the oppression of man by man,
has its foundation in the conditions of opposition, by which economic distinctions
have engendered all the social distinctions; from the relative liberty of
the few is born the servitude of the greater number, and law has been the
protector of injustice. Progress, thus seen and clearly appreciated, appears
to us as the moral and intellectual epitome of all human miseries and of
all material inequalities.




To discover this inevitable relativity it was necessary that communism,
born at first as an instinctive movement in the soul of the oppressed, should
become a science and a political party. It was then necessary that our doctrine
should give the measure of value for all past history, by discovering in
every form of social organization, antithetical in its origin and organization,
as they have all been up to this time, the innate incapacity for producing
the conditions of a universal and uniform human progress, that is to say,
by discovering the fetters which turn each benefit into an injury.




VI




There is one question which we cannot evade: What has given birth to the
belief in historic factors?




That is an expression familiar to many and often found in the writings
of many scholars, scientists and philosophers, and of those commentators
who, by their reasonings or by their combinations, add a little to simple
historic narration and utilize this opinion as an hypothesis to find a starting
point in the immense mass of human facts, which, at first sight and after
first examination, appear so confused and irreducible. This belief, this
current opinion, has become for reasoning historians, or even for rationalists,
a semi- doctrine, which has recently been urged several times, as a decisive
argument, against the unitary theory of the materialistic conception. And
indeed, this belief is so deeply rooted and this opinion so widespread, of
history being only intelligible as the juncture and the meeting of various
factors, that, in consequence, many of those who speak of social materialism,
whether they be its partisans or adversaries, believe that they save themselves
from embarrassment by affirming that this whole doctrine consists in the
fact that it attributes the preponderance or the decisive action to the economic
factor.




It is very important to take account of the fashion in which this belief,
this opinion, or this semi-doctrine takes its rise, because real and fruitful
criticism consists principally in knowing and understanding the motive of
what we declare an error. It does not suffice to reject an opinion by characterizing
it as false doctrine. Error always arises from some ill- understood side
of an incomplete experience, or from some subjective imperfection. It does
not suffice to reject the error; we must overcome it, explain it and outgrow
it.




Every historian, at the beginning of his work, performs, so to speak,
an act of elimination. First, he makes erasures, as it were, in a continuous
series of events; then he dispenses with numerous and varied suppositions
and precedents; more than this, he tears up and decomposes a complicated
tissue. Thus, to begin with, he must fix a point, a line, a boundary, as
he chooses; he must say, for example: I wish to relate the beginning of the
war between the Greeks and the Persians, or to inquire how Louis XVI. was
brought to convene the States General. The narrator finds himself, in a word,
confronted with a complexus of accomplished facts and of facts on the point
of being produced, which in their totality present a certain aspect. Upon
the attitude which he takes depends the form and the style of every narration,
because to compose it he must take his point of departure from things already
accomplished, in order to see henceforth how they have continued to develop.




Yet into this complexus he must introduce a certain degree of analysis,
resolving it into groups and into aspects of facts, or into concurrent elements,
which afterwards appear at a certain moment as independent categories. It
is the state in a certain form and with certain powers; it is the laws, which
determine, by what they command or what they prohibit, certain relations;
it is the manners and customs which reveal to us tendencies, needs, ways
of thinking, of believing, of imagining; altogether it is a multitude of
men living and working together, with a certain distribution of tasks and
occupations; he observes then the thoughts, the ideas, the inclinations,
the passions, the desires, the aspirations which arise and develop from this
varied mode of coexistence and from its frictions. Let a change be produced,
and it will show itself in one of the sides or one of the aspects of the
empirical complexus, or in all of these within a longer or a shorter time;
for example, the state extends its boundaries, or changes its internal limits
as regards society by increasing or diminishing its powers and its attributes,
or by changing the mode of action of one or the other; or, again, the law
modifies its dispositions, or it expresses and affirms itself through new
organs; or, again, finally, behind the change of exterior and daily habits,
we discover a change in the sentiments, the thoughts and the inclinations
of the men variously distributed in the different social classes, who mingle,
change, replace each other, disappear or reappear. All this may be sufficiently
understood, in its exterior forms and outlines, through the usual endowments
of normal intelligence which is not yet aided, corrected or completed by
science strictly so-called. Assembling within precise limits a conception
of such facts is the true and proper object of narration, which is so much
the clearer, more vivid and more exact, as it takes the form of a monograph;
witness Thucydides in the Peloponnesian war.




Society already evolved in a certain fashion, society already arrived
at a certain degree of development, society already so complicated that it
conceals the economic substructure which supports all the rest, has not revealed
itself to the simple narrators, except in these visible facts, in these most
apparent results, and in these most significant symptoms which are the political
forms, the legal dispositions and the partisan passions. The narrator, both
because he lacks any theoretical doctrine regarding the true sources of the
historic movement, and by the very attitude which he takes on the subject
of the things which he unites according to the appearances which they have
come to assume, cannot reduce them to unity, unless it be as a result of
a single, immediate intuition, and if he is an artist, this intuition takes
on a color in his mind and transforms itself there into dramatic action.
His task is finished if he succeeds in massing a certain number of facts
and events in certain limits and confines over which the observer may look
as on a clear perspective; in the same way, purely descriptive geography
has accomplished its task, if it sums up in a vivid and clear design a concourse
of physical causes which determine the immediate aspect of the Gulf of Naples,
for example, without going back to its genesis.




It is in this need of graphic narration that arises the first intuitive,
palpable, and, I might almost say, esthetic and artistic occasion for all
those abstractions and those generalizations, which are finally summed up
in the semi-doctrine of the so-called factors.




Here are two notable men, the Gracchi, who wished to put an end to the
process of appropriation of the public land and to prevent the agglomeration
of the latifundium, which was diminishing or causing to completely disappear
the class of small proprietors, that is to say, of the free men, who are
the foundation and the condition of the democratic life of the ancient city.
What were the causes of their failure. Their aim is clear, their spirit,
their origin, their character, their heroism are manifest. They have against
them other men with other interests and with other designs. The struggle
appears to the mind at first merely as a struggle of intentions and passions,
which unfolds and comes to an end by the aid of means which are permitted
by the political form of the state and by the use or abuse or the public
powers. Here is the situation: the city ruling in different manners over
other cities or over territories which have lost all character of autonomy;
within this city a very decided differentiation between rich and poor; and
facing the comparatively small group of the oppressors and the all-powerful,
stands the immense mass of the proletarians, who are on the point of losing
or who have already lost the consciousness and the political strength of
a body of citizens, the mass which therefore suffers itself to be deceived
and corrupted, and which will soon decay till it is but a servile accessory
to its aristocratic exploiters. There is the material of the narrator, and
he cannot take account of the fact otherwise than in the immediate conditions
of the fact itself. The complete whole is directly seen and forms the stage
on which the events unfold, but if the narration is to have solidity, vividness
and perspective there must be points of departure and ways of interpretation.




In this consists the first origin of those abstractions, which little
by little take away from the different parts of a given social complexus
their quality of simple sides or aspects of a whole, and it is their ensuing
generalization which little by little leads to the doctrine of factors.




These factors, to express it in another way, arise in the mind as a sequence
of the abstraction and generalization of the immediate aspects of the apparent
movement, and they have an equal value with that of all other empirical concepts.
Whatever be the domain of knowledge in which they arise, they persist until
they are reduced and eliminated by a new experience, or until they are absorbed
by a conception more general, genetic, evolutionary or dialectic. Was it
not necessary that in the empirical analysis and in the immediate study of
the causes and the effects of certain definite phenomena, for example the
phenomena of heat, the mind should first stop at this presumption and this
persuasion, that it could and should attribute them to a subject, which if
it was never for any physicist a true and substantial entity, was certainly
considered as a definite and specific force, namely, heat. Now we see that
at a given moment, as a result of new experiences, this heat is resolved
in given conditions into a certain quantity of motion. Still further, our
thought is now on the way toward resolving all these physical factors into
the flux of one universal energy, in which the hypotheses of the atoms, in
the extent to which it is necessary, loses all residue of metaphysical survival.




Was it not inevitable, as a first step of knowledge in what concerns the
problem of life, to spend a considerable time in the separate study of the
organs and to reduce them to systems? Without this anatomy, which seems too
material and too gross, no progress in these studies would have been possible;
and nevertheless, above the unknown genesis and co-ordination of such an
analytic multiplicity, there were evolving, uncertain and vague, the generic
conceptions of life, soul, etc. In these mental creations have long been
seen that biological unity which has finally found its object in the certain
beginning of the cell and in its process of immanent multiplication.




More difficult certainly was the way which the thought had to traverse
to reconstruct the genesis of all the facts of psychic life, from the most
elementary successions up to the most complex derived products. Not only
for reasons of theoretical difficulties, but in consequence of popular prejudices,
the unity and continuity of psychic phenomena appeared, up to the time of
Herbart, as separated and divided into so many factors, faculties of the
soul.




The interpretation of the historico-social processus met the same difficulties;
it also was obliged to stop at first in the provisional view of factors.
And that being so, it is easy for us now to find again the first origin of
that opinion in the necessity that the historians have of finding in the
facts that they relate with more or less artistic talent and in different
professional views, certain points of immediate orientation, such as may
be offered by the study of the apparent movement of human events.




But in this apparent movement, there are the elements of a more exact
view. These concurrent factors, which abstract thought conceives and then
isolates, have never been seen acting each for itself. On the contrary, they
act in such a manner that it gives birth to the concept of reciprocal action.
Moreover, these factors themselves arise at a given moment, and it is not
until later that they acquired that physiognomy which they have in the particular
narration. This State, it is well known, arose at a given moment. As for
every rule of law, it may either be remembered or conjectured that it went
into effect under such or such circumstances. As for many customs, it may
be remembered that they were introduced at a given moment; and the simplest
comparisons of the facts in different times or different places would show
how society, as a whole, and in its character of being an aggregation of
different classes, had taken and took continuously various forms.




The reciprocal action of the different factors, without which not even
the simplest narration would be possible, like the more or less exact information
upon the origins and the variations of the factors themselves, called for
research and thought more than did the constructive narration of those great
historians who are real artists. And, in effect, the problems which arise
spontaneously from the data of history, combined with other theoretical elements,
gave birth to the different so-called practical disciplines, which in a more
or less rapid fashion and with varying success, have developed from the ancients
up to our days, from ethics to the philosophy of law, from politics to sociology,
from law to economics.




Now with the rise and formation of so many disciplines, through the inevitable
division of labor, points of view have been multiplied out of all proportion.
It is certain that for the first and immediate analysis of the multiple aspects
of the social complexus, a long labor of partial abstraction was necessary:
which has always inevitably resulted in one-sided views. This can be shown,
in a clearer and more evident manner than for any other domain, in that of
law and its various generalizations, including the philosophy of law. By
reason of these abstractions, which are inevitable in particular and empirical
analysis, and by the effect of the division of labor, the different sides
and different manifestations of the social complexus were, from time to time,
fixed and stratified in general conceptions and categories. The works, the
effects, the emanations, the effusions of human activity -- law, economic
forms, principles of conduct, etc., -- were, so to speak, translated and
transformed into laws, into imperatives and into principles which remained
placed above man himself. And from time to time it has been necessary to
discover anew this simple truth: that the only permanent and sure fact, that
is to say, the only datum from which departs and to which returns every practical
detail of discipline, is men grouped in a determined social form by means
of determined connections. The different analytical disciplines, which illustrate
the facts that develop in history, have finally given rise to the need of
a common and general social science, which renders possible the unification
of the historic processus, and the materialistic doctrine marks precisely
the final term, the apex of this unification.




But that has not been, nor ever will be, lost time which is expended in
the preliminary and lateral analysis of complex facts. To the methodical
division of labor we owe precise learning, that is to say, the mass of knowledge
passed into the sieve, systematized, without which social history would always
be wandering in a purely abstract domain, in questions of form and terminology.
The separate study of the historico-social factors has served, like any other
empirical study which does not transcend the apparent movement of things,
to improve the instrument of observation and to permit us to find again in
the facts themselves, which have been artificially abstracted, the keystones
which bind them into the social complexus. The different disciplines which
are considered as isolated and independent in the hypotheses of the concurrent
factors in the formation of history, both by reason of the degree of development
which they have reached, the materials which they have gathered, and the
methods which they have elaborated, have to-day become quite indispensable
for us, if one desires to reconstruct any portion out of past times. Where
would our historic science be without the one-sidedness of philology, which
is the fundamental instrument of all research, and where should we have found
the guiding thread of a history of juridical institutions, which returns
again from itself to so many other facts and to so many other combinations,
without the obstinate faith of the Romanists in the universal excellence
of the Roman law, which engendered with generalized law and with the philosophy
of law so many problems which serve as points of departure for sociology?




It is thus, after all, that the historic factors, of which so many speak,
and which are mentioned in so many works, indicate something which is much
less than the truth, but much more than simple error, in the ordinary sense
of a blunder, of an illusion. They are the necessary product of a knowledge
which is in the course of development and formation. They arise from the
necessity of finding a point of departure in the confused spectacle which
human events present to him who wishes to narrate them; and they serve thenceforth,
so to speak, as a title, category or index to that inevitable division of
labor, by the extension of which the historico-social material has, up to
this time, been theoretically elaborated. In this domain of knowledge, as
well as in that of the natural sciences, the unity of real principle and
the unity of formal treatment are never found at the first start, but only
after a long and troublous road. So that again from this point of view the
analogy affirmed by Engels between the discovery of historical materialism
and that of the conservation of energy appears to us excellent.




The provisional orientation, according to the convenient system of what
are called factors, may, under given circumstances, be useful also to us
who profess an altogether unitary principle of historic interpretation, if
we do not wish simply to rest in the domain of theory, but wish to illustrate,
through personal research, a definite period of history. As in that case
we must proceed to direct and detailed research, we must first of all follow
the groups of facts that seem pre-eminent, independent, or detached in the
aspects of immediate experience. We should not imagine, in fact, that the
unitary principle so well established, at which we have arrived in the general
conception of history, may, like a talisman, act always and at first sight,
as an infallible method of resolving into simple elements the immense area
and the complicated gearing of society. The underlying economic structure,
which determines all the rest, is not a simple mechanism whence emerge, as
immediate, automatic and mechanical effects, institutions, laws, customs,
thoughts, sentiments, ideologies. From this substructure to all the rest,
the process of derivation and of mediation is very complicated, of ten subtle,
tortuous and not always legible.




The social organization is, as we already know, constantly unstable, although
that does not seem evident to every one, except at the time when the instability
enters upon that acute period which is called a revolution. This instability,
with the constant struggles in the bosom of that same organized society,
excludes the possibility for men coming to an agreement which might involve
a new start at living an animal life. It is the antagonisms which are the
principal cause of progress (Marx). But it is equally true, notwithstanding,
that in this unstable organization, in which is given to us the inevitable
form of domination and subjection, intelligence is always developed not only
unequally, but quite imperfectly, incongruously and partially. There has
been and there is still in society what we may call a hierarchy of intelligence,
sentiments and conceptions. To suppose that men, always and in all cases,
have had an approximately clear consciousness of their own situation, and
of what was the most rational thing to do, is to suppose the improbable and,
indeed, the unreal.




Forms of law, political acts and attempts at social organization were,
and they still are, sometimes fortunate, sometimes mistaken, that is to say,
disproportionate and unsuitable. History is full of errors; and this means
that if all was necessary, granted the relative intelligence of those who
have to solve a difficulty or to find a solution for a given problem, etc.,
if everything in it has a sufficient reason, yet everything in it was not
reasonable, in the sense which the optimists give to this word. To state
it more fully, the determined causes of all changes, that is to say the modified
economic conditions, have ended and end by causing to be found, sometimes
through tortuous ways, the suitable forms of law, the appropriate political
orders and the more or less perfect means of social adjustment. But it must
not be thought that the instinctive wisdom of the reasoning animal has been
manifested, or is manifested, definitely and simply, in the complete and
clear understanding of all situations, and that we have left only the very
simple task of following the deductive road from the economic situation to
all the rest. Ignorance -- which, in its turn, may be explained -- is an
important reason for the manner in which history is made; and, to ignorance
we must add the brutishness which is never completely subdued and all the
passions, and all the injustices, and the various forms of corruption, which
were and are the necessary product of a society organized in such a way,
that the domination of man over man in it is inevitable, and that from this
domination falsehood, hypocrisy, presumption and baseness were and are inseparable.
We may, without being utopians, but simply because we are critical communists,
foresee, as we do in fact foresee, the coming of a society which, developing
from the present society and from its very contrasts by the laws inherent
in its historic development, will end in an association without class antagonisms;
which will have for its consequence that regulated production will eliminate
from life the element of chance which, thus far, has been revealed in history
as a multiform cause of accidents and incidents. But that is the future,
and it is neither the present nor the past. If we propose to ourselves, on
the contrary, to penetrate into the historic events which have developed
up to our own times, by taking, as we do, for a guiding thread the variations
of the forms of the underlying economic structure up to the simplest datum
in the variations of the tool of production, we must become fully conscious
of the difficulty of the problem which we are setting ourselves: because
here we have not merely to open our eyes and behold, but to make a, supreme
effort of thought, with the aim of triumphing over the multiform spectacle
of immediate experience to reduce its elements into a genetic series. That
is why I said that, in particular investigations, we must ourselves start
from those groups of apparently isolated facts, and from this heterogeneous
mass, in a word, from that empirical study, whence arose the belief in factors,
which afterwards became a semi-doctrine.




It is useless to attempt at counterbalancing these essential difficulties
by the metaphorical hypothesis, often equivocal, and after all of a purely
analogical value, of the so-called social organism. It was necessary too
that the mind should pass through even this hypothesis, which so shortly
became phraseology pure and simple. It indeed prepares the way for the comprehension
of the historic movement as springing from the laws immanent in society itself,
and thereby excludes the arbitrary, the transcendental and the irrational.
But the metaphor has no further application; and the particular, critical
and circumstantial research into historic facts is the sole source of that
concrete and positive knowledge which is necessary to the complete development
of economic materialism.




VII




Ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing comes to us in a dream. The
change in the ways of thinking, lately produced by the historic doctrine
which we are here examining and commenting upon, takes place at first slowly
and afterwards with an increasing rapidity, precisely in that period of human
development, in which were realized the great politico-economic revolutions,
that is to say, in that epoch which, considered in its political forms, is
called liberal, but which, considered in its basis, by reason of the domination
of capital over the proletarian mass, is the epoch of anarchical production.
The change in ideas, even to the creation of new methods of conception, has
reflected little by little the experience of a new life. This, in the revolutions
of the last two centuries, was little by little despoiled of the mythical,
religious and mystical envelopes in proportion as it acquired the practical
and precise consciousness of its immediate and direct conditions. Human thought,
also, which sums up this life and theorizes upon it, has little by little
been plundered of its theological and metaphysical hypotheses to take refuge
finally in this prosaic assertion: in the interpretation of history we must
limit ourselves to the objective co-ordination of the determining conditions
and of the determined effects. The materialistic conception marks the culminating
point of this new tendency in the investigation of the historic social laws,
in so far as it is not a particular case of a generic sociology, or of a
generic philosophy of the State, of law, and of history, but the solution
of all doubts and all uncertainties which accompany the other forms of philosophizing
upon human affairs, and the beginning of their integral interpretation.




It is thus an easy thing, especially in the way it has been done by certain
shallow critics, to find precursors for Marx and Engels, who first defined
this doctrine in its fundamental points. And when did it ever occur to any
of their disciples, even of the strictest school, to represent these two
thinkers as miracle-workers? What is more, if we wish to go on a search after
the premises of the logical creation of Marx and Engels, it will not suffice
to stop at those who are called the precursors of socialism, Saint Simon
for example, and his predecessors, or the philosophers, particularly Hegel,
or the economists who had laid bare the anatomy of the society which produces
commodities; we must go back to the very formation of modern society, and
then at last declare triumphantly that the theory is a plagarism from the
things that it explains.




The truth is that the real precursors of the new doctrine were the facts
of modern history, which has become so transparent and so explanatory of
itself since the accomplishment in England of the great industrial revolution
at the end of the eighteenth century, and since the great social upheaval
took place in France. These things, mutatis mutandis, have subsequently been
reproduced, in various combinations and in milder forms, throughout the whole
civilized world. And what else is our thought at bottom if not the conscious
and systematic complement of experience, and what is this last if not the
reflection and the mental elaboration of the things and the processes which
arise and unfold either outside our volition, or through the work of our
activity; and what is genius but the individualized, derived and acute form
of thought, which rises through the suggestion of experience, in many men
of the same epoch, but which remains in most of them fragmentary, incomplete,
uncertain, wavering and partial?




Ideas do not fall from heaven; and what is more, like the other products
of human activity, they are formed in given circumstances, in the precise
fullness of time, through the action of definite needs, thanks to the repeated
attempts at their satisfaction, and by the discovery of such and such other
means of proof which are, as it were, the instruments of their production
and their elaboration. Even ideas involve a basis of social conditions; they
have their technique; thought also is a form of work. To rob the one and
the other, ideas and thought, of the conditions and environment of their
birth and their development, is to disfigure their nature and their meaning.




To show how the materialistic conception of history arises precisely in
given conditions, not as a personal and tentative opinion of two writers,
but as the new conquest of thought by the inevitable suggestion of a new
world which is in process of birth, that is to say the proletarian revolution,
that was the object of my first essay, "In Memory of the Communist Manifesto."
That is, to repeat, a new historic situation found its complement in its
appropriate mental instrument.




To imagine now that this intellectual production might have been realized
at any time and at any place, would be to take absurdity for the ruling principle
in research. To transport ideas arbitrarily from the basis and the historic
conditions in which they arise to any other basis whatever, is like taking
the irrational for the basis of reasoning. Why should one not fancy equally
that the ancient city, in which arose Greek art and science and Roman law,
remaining all the while an ancient democratic city, with slavery, might at
the same time acquire and develop all the conditions of modern technique?
Why not believe that the trade guild of the Middle Ages, remaining all the
while on its inflexible mould, should take its way to the conquest of the
world market without the conditions of unlimited competition, which actually
began by its destruction and negation? Why not imagine a fief which, remaining
a fief all the while, should become a factory producing commodities exclusively?
Why could not Michel de Lando have written the Communist Manifesto? Why could
we not also believe that the discoveries of modern science could have proceeded
from the brains of men of no matter what other time and place, that is to
say, before determined conditions had given rise to determined needs, and
before repeated and accumulated experiences should have provided for the
satisfaction of these needs?




Our doctrine assumes the broad, conscious and continuous development of
modern technique, and with it that society which produces commodities in
the antagonisms of competition, that society which as a first condition and
an indispensable means for its own perpetuation presupposes capitalist accumulation
in the form of private property; that society which continually produces
and reproduces proletarians, and which if it is to perpetuate itself, must
incessantly revolutionize its tools, and with them the State and its legal
gearings. This society, which, by the very laws of its movement, has laid
bare its own anatomy, produces by its reaction the materialistic conception.
Even as it has produced in socialism its positive negation, so it has engendered
in the new historic doctrine its ideal negation. If history is the product,
not arbitrary, but necessary and normal, of men in so far as they are developing,
and if they are developing in so far as they are making social experiments,
and if they are experimenting in so far as they are making improvements in
their labor, which accumulate and preserve products and results, the phase
of development in which we live cannot be the last and final phase, and the
contrasts which are intimately bound to it and inherent in it are the productive
forces of new conditions. And this is how the period of the great economic
and political revolutions of these last two centuries has ripened in the
mind these two concepts: the immanence and constancy of the processus in
historic facts, and the materialist doctrine, which is at bottom the objective
theory of social revolutions.




It is beyond doubt that to reascend through the centuries and reconstruct
in our thought the development of social ideas to the extent that we find
their documents in writers, is something always very instructive, and serving
especially to add to our critical knowledge of our concepts as of our ways
of thinking. Such a return of the mind over its historic premises, when it
does not lead us astray into the empiricism of a boundless erudition, and
does not lead us to set-up hastily vain analogies, serves without any doubt
to give suppleness and a persuasive force to the forms of our scientific
activity. In the sum of our science we find again, in fact and through the
approximative continuity of tradition, the excellence of all that has been
found, conceived and proved, not only in modern times but even in ancient
Greece, where first begins precisely and in a definite fashion for the human
race the orderly development of conscious, reflective and methodical thought.
It would be impossible to take a single step in scientific research without
employing means long ago found and tried, such for example as logic and mathematics.
To think otherwise would be to assume that each generation must begin over
again all the work done since the childhood of humanity.




But it was not given either to the ancient authors in the limited circle
of their urban republics, nor to the writers of the Renaissance, always drifting
between an imaginary return to antiquity and the need of grasping intellectually
the new world in process of birth, to arrive at the precise analysis of the
last elements from which society results, and which the incomparable genius
of Aristotle did not see, and did not understand beyond the limits within
which passes the life of the typical citizen.




The investigation of the social structure, considered in its manners of
origin and processus, became active and penetrating and took on multiform
aspects in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when economics took
shape and when under the different names of "Natural Rights," "The
Spirit of the Laws," or "The Social Contract, it was attempted
to resolve into causes, into factors and into logical and psychological data,
the multiform and often obscure spectacle of a life in which was preparing
the greatest revolution ever known. These doctrines, whatever may have been
the subjective intention and spirit of the authors -- as in the contrasting
cases of the conservative Hobbes and the proletarian Rousseau -- were all
revolutionary in their substance and their effects. Under all of them is
always found, as a stimulus and motive, the material and moral needs of a
new age, which, by reason of historic conditions, were those of the bourgeoisie.
Thus it was necessary to wage war in the name of liberty upon tradition,
the Church, privileges, fixed classes, that is to say, the orders and conditions,
and consequently upon the State which was or appeared to be their author,
and then upon the special privileges of commerce, the arts, labor and science.
And man was studied in an abstract fashion, that is to say, individuals taken
separately, emancipated and delivered by a logical abstraction from their
historic connection and from every social necessity: in the mind of many
the concept of society was reduced to atoms, and it even seemed natural to
the greatest number to believe that society is only the sum of the individuals
composing it. The abstract categories of individual psychology sufficed for
the explanation of all human facts; and this is how in all these systems,
nothing is spoken of but fear, self-love, egoism, voluntary obedience, tendency
toward happiness, the original goodness of man, the freedom of contract and
of the moral consciousness, and of the moral instinct or sense, and also
many other similar abstract and generic things, as if they were sufficient
to explain history, and to create a new history out of its fragments.




By the fact that all society was entering upon an acute crisis, its horror
at the antique, at what was superannuated, at what was traditional and had
been organized for centuries, and the presentiment of a renovation of all
human life, finally produced a total eclipse of the ideas of historic necessity
and social necessity, that is to say, of those ideas which, barely indicated
by the ancient philosophers, and so developed in our century, had at this
period of revolutionary rationalism only rare representatives, like Vico,
Montesquieu, and, in part, Quesnay. In this historic situation, which gave
birth to a literature that was nimble, destructive and very popular, is found
the reason for what Louis Blanc with a certain emphasis has called individualism.
Later some have thought they saw in this word the expression of a permanent
fact in human nature, which especially might serve as a decisive argument
against socialism.




A singular spectacle, and a singular contrast! Capital, however produced,
tended to overcome all previous forms of production, and, breaking every
bond and boundary, to become the direct or indirect master of society, as,
in fact, it has become in the greater part of the world; hence it resulted,
that apart from all forms of modern misery and the new hierarchy in which
we live, there was realized the most acute antithesis of all history, that
is to say, the existing anarchy of production in the whole of society, and
an iron despotism in the mode of production in each workshop and each factory!
And the thinkers, the philosophers, the economists and the popularizers of
the eighteenth century saw nothing but liberty and equality! All reasoned
in the same way; all started from the same premises, which brought them to
conclude that liberty must be obtained from a government of pure administration,
or that they were democrats or even communists. The approaching reign of
liberty was before the eyes of all as a certain event, provided they could
suppress the bonds and fetters which forced ignorance and the despotism of
church and state had imposed upon men, good by nature. These fetters did
not appear to be conditions and boundaries within which men were found by
the laws of their development, and by the effect of the antagonistic and
thus uncertain and tortuous movement of history, but simply obstacles from
which the methodical use of reason was to deliver us. In this idealism, which
reached its culminating point in certain heroes of the French Revolution,
is the seed of a limitless faith in the certain progress of the whole human
race. For the first time, the concept of humanity appeared in all its branches,
unmingled with religious ideas or hypotheses. The boldest of these idealists
were the extreme materialists, because, denying every religious fiction,
they assigned this earth as a certain domain to the necessity of happiness
provided that reason might open the way.




Never were ideas abused in so inhuman a fashion as between the close of
the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The lesson of
things was very hard, the saddest disillusions arose and a radical upheaval
followed in the minds of men. Facts, in a word, proved to be contrary to
all expectations; and this at first produced a profound discouragement among
the disillusioned, which, notwithstanding, gave rise to the desire and the
need of new investigations. We know that Saint Simon and Fourier, in whom
operated precisely at the beginning of the century, in the exclusive forms
of the ideas of premature genius, the reaction against the immediate results
of the politico-economic revolution, arose resolutely, the first against
the jurists, and the second against the economists.




In fact, when once the obstacles to liberty, which had been characteristic
of other times, had been suppressed, new obstacles, graver and more painful,
had replaced them, and, as equal happiness for all was not realized, society
remained in its political form as it had been before, an organization of
inequalities. It must be, then, that society is something autonomous, innate,
a complex automaton of relations and conditions, which defies the subjective
good intentions of each of the members who compose it, and which escapes
from the illusions and the designs of the idealists. It thus follows a course
of its own from which we may infer certain laws of process and development,
but does not suffer us to impose laws upon it. By this transformation in
the minds of men, the nineteenth century heralded itself as the century of
historic science and of sociology.




The principle of development has, indeed, since then, invaded all domains
of thought. In this century, the grammar of history has been discovered,
and thus the key has been found to explore the genesis of myths. The embryonic
traces of prehistory have been sought out, and, for the first time, the processes
of political and legal forms have been arranged into a series. The nineteenth
century heralded itself as the century of sociology in the person of Saint
Simon, in whom, as happens with the self-taught precursors of genius, we
find confused together the germs of so many contradictory tendencies. In
this aspect the materialistic conception is a result; but it is a result
which is the complement of the whole process of formation; and as a result
and a complement it is also the simplification of all historic science and
of all sociology, because it takes us back from things derived and from complex
conditions to elemental functions. And that is brought about by the direct
suggestion of new dynamic experience.




The laws of economics, such as they are of themselves and their own inherent
force, have triumphed over all illusions and have shown themselves to be
the directing power of social life. The great industrial revolution which
was produced made it clear that social classes, if they are not a fact of
nature, are still less a consequence of chance and of free will; they arise
historically and socially in a determined form of production. And who, in
truth, has not seen the birth under his eyes of new proletarians upon the
economic ruin of so many classes of small proprietors, small peasants and
artisans; and who has not been in a position to discover the method of this
new creation of a new social status, to which so many men were reduced and
in which they were necessarily obliged to live. Who has not been in a position
to discover that money, transformed into capital, had succeeded, in a few
years, in becoming master by the attraction which it exercises over the labor
of free men, in whom the necessity of selling themselves freely as wage workers
had been prepared long before by so many ingenious legal processes and by
violent or indirect expropriation? And who has not seen the new cities rise
around factories and create around their circumference this desolating poverty,
which is no longer the effect of individual misfortune, but the condition
and the source of wealth? And in this new poverty were numerous women and
children, arising for the first time from an unknown existence to take their
place on the page of history as a sinister illustration of a society of equals.
And who did not feel -- even if that had not, been announced in the so-called
doctrine of the Rev. Malthus -- that the number of guests which this mode
of economic organization can entertain, if it is sometimes insufficient for
him who, by reason of the favorable state of production, has need of hands,
is often also superabundant, and therefore finds no occupation and becomes
a source of danger? It becomes evident, also, that the rapid and violent
economic transformation which was accomplished openly in England had succeeded
there, because that country had been able to build up for itself, as compared
with the rest of Europe, a monopoly till then unknown, and because to maintain
this monopoly an unscrupulous policy had been rendered necessary, and that
permitted all, for one happy moment, to translate into prose the ideological
myth of the state, which was to be the guardian and the preceptor of the
people.




This immediate perception of these consequences of the new life was the
origin of the pessimism, more or less romantic, of the laudatores temporis
acti from De Maistre to Carlyle. The satire of liberalism invaded minds and
literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then begins that criticism
of society, which is the first step in all sociology. It was necessary before
all else to overthrow the ideology, which had accumulated and expressed itself
in so many doctrines of the Natural Right or the Social Contract. It was
necessary to get into contact with the facts which the rapid events of so
intensive a processus imposed upon the attention in forms so new and startling.




Here appears Owen, incomparable at all points of view, but especially
for the clearness which he displayed in the determination of the causes of
the new poverty, even though he was but a child in his quest of the means
for overcoming it. It was necessary to arrive at the objective criticism
of economics, which appeared for the first time, in one-sided and reactionary
forms, in Sismondi. In this period where the conditions of a new historic
science were ripening, arose so many different forms of socialism, utopian,
one-sided or completely extravagant, which never reached the proletarians,
either because these had no political consciousness, or if they had any,
it manifested itself in sudden starts, as in the French conspiracies and
riots from 1830 to 1848, or they kept on the political ground of immediate
reforms, as is the case with the Chartists. And nevertheless all this socialism,
however Utopian, fantastic and ideological it may have been, was an immediate
and often salutary criticism of economics -- a one-sided criticism, indeed,
which lacked the scientific complement of a general historical conception.




All these forms of criticism, partial, one-sided and incomplete had their
culmination in scientific socialism. This is no longer subjective criticism
applied to things but the discovery of the self-criticism which is in the
things themselves. The real criticism of society is society, itself, which,
by the antithetic conditions of the contrasts upon which it rests, engenders
from itself, within itself, the contradiction, and finally triumphs over
this by its passage into a new form. The solution of the existing antitheses
is the proletariat, which the proletarians themselves know or do not know.
Even as their misery has become the condition of present society, so in their
misery is the justification of the new proletarian revolution. It is in this
passage from the criticism of subjective thought, which examines things outside
and imagines it can correct them at once, to the understanding of the self-criticism
exercised by society over itself n the immanence of its own processus --
it is in this only that the dialectic of history consists, which Marx and
Engels, in so far as they were materialists, drew from the idealism of Hegel.
But on the final reckoning it matters little whether the literary men, who
knew no other meaning for dialectics than that of an artificial sophistry
nor whether the doctors and scholars who are never apt to go beyond the knowledge
of particular facts can ever account themselves for these hidden and complicated
forms of thought.




But the great economic transformation, which has furnished the materials
composing modern society, in which the empire of capitalism has arrived at
the limit of its complete development, would not have been so immediately
and so suggestively instructive, if it had not been luminously illustrated
by the bewildering and catastrophic movement of the French Revolution. This
put in evidence, like a tragedy on the stage, all the antagonistic forces
of modern society, because this society has developed on the ruins of previous
forms, and because, in so short a time and with so hasty a march, it has
traversed the phases of its birth and its establishment.




The revolution ensued from the obstacles which the bourgeoisie had to
overcome by violence, since it appeared from evidence that the passage from
the old forms to the new forms of production -- or of property, if we borrow
the language of jurists - could not be realized by the quieter ways of successive
and gradual reforms. It brought in its train the upheaval, the friction and
the intermingling of all the old classes of the Ancient Regime, and the rapid
and bewildering formation at the same time of new classes, in the very rapid
but very intensive period of ten years, which, compared with the ordinary
history of other times and other countries, seems to us like centuries. This
rapid succession of monumental events brought to light the most characteristic
moments and aspects of the new or modern society, and that so much the more
clearly since the militant bourgeoisie had already created for itself intellectual
means and organs which had given it with the theory of its own work the reflex
consciousness of its movement.




The violent expropriation of the great part of the old property, that
is to say, of the property crystallized in fiefs, in royal and princely domains
and in mortmain, with the real and personal rights derived therefrom, put
at the disposal of the state, which by the necessity of things had become
an exceptional, terrible and all-powerful government, an extraordinary mass
of economic resources; thus, there were, on the one side, the singular policy
of the assignats which finally annulled themselves, and on the other side,
the formation of the new proprietors who owed their fortune to the chances
of gambling, to intrigue and to speculation. And who again would have dared
thereafter to swear upon the ancient, sacred altar of property, when his
recent and authentic title rested in so evident a manner upon the knowledge
of fortunate circumstances? If it had ever passed through the head of so
many troublesome philosophers, beginning with the Sophists, that law is a
creation of man, useful and convenient, this heretical proposition might
seem thenceforth a simple and intuitive truth to the meanest of the beggars
in Paris. Had not the proletarians with all the common people given the impulse
to the revolution in general by the expected movements of April, I789, and
did they not afterwards find themselves, as it were, driven anew from the
stage of history after the failure of the revolt of Prairial in 1795? Had
they not carried on their shoulders all the ardent defenders of liberty and
equality? Had they not held in their hands the Paris Commune, which was,
for a time, the impulsive organ of the Assembly and of all France; had they
not finally the bitter disillusion of having created new masters for themselves
with their own hands? The bewildering consciousness of this disillusion constitutes
the psychological motive, rapid and immediate, of the conspiracy of Babeuf,
which, for that very reason, is a great fact in history, and bears in itself
all the elements of objective tragedy.




The land which fief and mortmain had, as it were, bound to a body, to
a family, to a title, now, delivered from its bonds, had become a commodity,
to serve as a basis and instrument for the production of merchandise; so
docile a commodity, that it was put into circulation in the form of morsels
of paper. And around these symbols, multiplied to such a degree over the
things that they were to represent that they finished by no longer having
any value, Business came forth, a giant, arising, from all sides, on the
shoulders of those most wretched in their poverty, and through all the devious
ways of politics; it was especially shameless in its way of taking part in
war and its glorious successes. Even the rapid progress of technique, hastened
by the urgency of circumstances, gave material and occasion to the prosperity
of business.




The laws of bourgeois economics, which are those of individual production
in the antagonistic field of competition, revolted furiously, through violence
and ruse, against the idealistic efforts of a revolutionary government which,
strong in its certainty of saving its country, and stronger still in its
illusion of founding for eternity the liberty of equals, believed it was
possible to suppress gambling by the guillotine, to eliminate Business by
closing the Stock Exchange and to assure existence to the common people by
fixing the maximum of prices for objects of prime necessity. Commodities,
prices and Business reasserted with violence their own liberty against those
who wished to preach to them and impose ethics upon them.




Thermidor, whatever may have been the original intentions of the Thermidorians,
whether vile, cowardly, or misguided, was, in its hidden causes as in its
apparent effects, the triumph of Business over democratic idealism. The constitution
of 1793, which marks the extreme limit that can be reached by the democratic
ideal, was never put into practice. The grave pressure of circumstances,
the menace of the foreigner, the different forms of internal rebellion, from
the Girondists to the Vendée, rendered necessary an exceptional government,
which was the Terror, born of fear. In proportion as dangers ceased, the
need of the terror ceased. But the democracy shattered itself against the
Business which was bringing into existence the property of new proprietors.
The constitution of the year III consecrated the principle of moderate liberalism,
whence proceeds all the constitutionalism of the European continent; but
it was, before all else, the road leading to the guaranty of property. To
change the proprietors while preserving property -- that is the banner, the
watchword, the ensign which defied through the years from Aug. 10, 1792,
the violent tumults as well as the bold designs of those who attempted to
found society upon virtue, equality and Spartan abnegation. But the Directory
was the footpath by which the revolution arrived at the downfall of itself
as an idealistic effort; and with the Directory, which was open and professed
corruption, this banner became a reality; the proprietors are changed, but
property is saved. And, indeed, to raise upon so many ruins a stable edifice,
there was need of real force; and this was found in that strange adventurer
of incomparable genius, upon whom fortune had imperially smiled, and he was
the only one who possessed the virtue of putting an end to this gigantic
fable, because there was in him neither shadow nor trace of moral scruples.




In this furor of events strange things happened. The citizens armed for
the defense of their country, victorious beyond its frontiers over surrounding
Europe, into which with their conquest they carried the revolution, transformed
themselves into a soldiery to oppress the liberty of their country. The peasants
who, at a moment of imperious suggestion, produced over the feudal estates
the anarchy of 1789, now having become soldiers, or small proprietors, or
small farmers, and having remained for a moment the advance sentinels of
the revolution, fell back into the silent and stolid calm of their traditional
life, which, without risks and without movements, served as a sure basis
for the so-called social order. The petty bourgeois of the cities, and the
former members of the guilds rapidly developed, in the camp of economic struggle,
into free traffickers in manual labor. The freedom of trade required that
every product become easily merchantable, and thus it triumphed over the
last obstacle, by enforcing the demand that labor also become for it a free
commodity.




All changed at this moment. The state, which for centuries so many million
deluded ones had regarded as a sacred institution or a divine mandate, allowed
its sovereign to be beheaded by the prosaic means of a technical machine,
and thereby lost its sacred character. The state, also, was becoming a technical
appliance, which substituted bureaucracy for hierarchy. And as the ancient
titles no longer assured their possessors the privilege of exercising diverse
functions, this new state could become the prey of all those who wished to
seize upon it; it found itself, in a word, put up at auction, with the provision
that the successful aspirants must be the solid guarantors of the property
of the new and the old proprietors. The new state, which had need of its
Eighteenth Brumaire to become an orderly bureaucracy, supported upon victorious
militarism, this state which completed the revolution in the act which denied
it, could not dispense with its scripture, and it found it in the Civil Code,
which is the golden book for a society which produces and sells commodities.
It is not in vain that generalized jurisprudence had preserved and annotated
for centuries, in the form of a scientific discipline, this Roman law, which
was, which is and ever shall be, the typical and classical form of the law
of every shopkeeping society, until communism puts an end to the possibility
of buying and selling.




The bourgeoisie, which, by the concurrence of so many singular circumstances
effected the revolution with the concurrence of so many other classes and
semi-classes which after a short lapse of time almost all disappeared from
the political stage, seemed, in the moments of the most violent shocks, as
if moved by motives inspired by an ideology, which would have absolutely
no relation with the effects which actually supervene and perpetuated themselves.
The meaning of that is that in the heat of struggle the bewildering change
of the economic substructure appeared, as it were, disguised by ideals and
obscured by the interlacings of so many intentions and designs, whence sprung
so many acts of cruelty and of unparalleled heroism, so many currents of
illusion and hard facts of disenchantment. Never had so powerful a faith
in the ideal of progress sprung from human breasts. To deliver the human
race from superstitution, and even from religion, to make of each individual
a citizen, or of every private man a public man; those are its beginnings
-- and then on the line of this programme to sum up, in the short activity
of a few years, an evolution which appears to the most idealistic of today
as the work of several centuries to come-- that is the idealism of that time!
And why should it revolt at the pedagogy of the guillotine?




That poetry, grand certainly, if not joyous, left behind it a prose that
was severe enough. And it was the prose of the proprietors who owned their
property to chance, it was that of the high finance and the newly rich purveyors,
marshals, prefects, journalists and mercenary men of letters; it was the
prose of the court of that strange man to whom the qualities of military
genius grafted upon the soul of a brigand, had, without any doubt, conferred
the right of treating as an ideologist whoever did not admire the bare fact
which, in life, as it was with him, can be nothing else than the simple brutality
of success.




The French Revolution hastened the course of history in a large part of
Europe. To it attaches, on the Continent, all that we call liberalism and
modern democracy, except in the case of the false imitation of England, and
up to the establishment of Italian unity, which was and will remain perhaps
the last act of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. This revolution was the most
vivid and most instructive example of the fashion in which a society transforms
itself and how new economic conditions develop, and in developing co-ordinate
the members of society into groups and classes. It was the palpable proof
of the fashion in which law is found, when it is necessary for the expression
and the defense of definite relations, and how the state is created, and
how disposal is made of its means, its forces and its organs. Here is seen
how ideas arise from the fields of social institutions, and how characters,
tendencies, sentiments, volitions, that is to say, in a word, moral forces,
are produced and develop into conditions governed by circumstances. In a
word, the data of social science were, so to speak, prepared by society itself,
and it is no wonder if the revolution, which was preceded ideologically by
the most acute form of rationalistic doctrinairism ever known, ended finally
by leaving behind it the intellectual need of an anti-doctrinaire historical
and sociological science, like that which our own century has attempted to
construct.




And here, both by what we have seen and by what is known generally, it
is useless to recall anew, how Owen forms one of the same group with Saint
Simon and Fourier, and to repeat through what ways scientific socialism took
its birth. The important thing is in these two points: that historical materialism
could not arise but from the theoretical consciousness of socialism; and
that it can henceforth explain its own origin with its own principles, which
is the greatest proof of its maturity.




Thus I have justified the phrase at the beginning of this chapter: ideas
do not descend from heaven.




VIII




The road traversed thus far has enabled us to take exact account of the
precise and relative value of the so-called doctrine of factors; we know
also how its adherents come to eliminate objectively those provisional concepts,
which were and are a simple expression of a thought not fully arrived at
maturity.




And, nevertheless, it is necessary that we speak further of this doctrine,
in order to explain better and more in detail for what reasons two of the
so-called factors, the state and the law, have been and are still considered
as the principal and exclusive subject of history.




Historians have indeed for centuries placed in these forms of social life
the essence of development. Moreover, they have perceived this development
only in the modification of these forms. History has for centuries been treated
as a discipline relative to the juridico-political movement and even to the
political movement principally. The substitution of society for politics
is a recent thing, and much more recent still is the reduction of society
to the elements of historical materialism. In other words, sociology is of
quite recent invention, and the reader, I hope, will have understood for
himself that I employ this term for the sake of brevity, to indicate in a
general manner the science of social functions and variations, and that I
do not hold to the specific sense given it by the Positivists.




It is more satisfactory to say that, up to the beginning of this century,
the data bearing upon usages, customs, beliefs, etc., or even upon the natural
conditions, which serve as the foundation and connection for social forms,
were not mentioned in political histories unless as objects of simple curiosity,
or as accessories and complements of the narration.




All this cannot be a simple accident, and indeed is not. There is, then,
a double interest in taking account of the tardy appearance of social history,
both because our doctrine justifies yet again by this means its reason for
existence, and because we thus eliminate, in a definite manner, the so-called
factors.




If we make an exception of certain critical moments in which social classes,
by an extreme incapacity for adapting themselves to a condition of relative
equilibrium, enter into a crisis of more or less prolonged anarchy, and if
we make an exception of those catastrophes in which an entire world disappears,
as at the fall of the Roman Empire of the West, or at the dissolution of
the Califate, then it may be said that, ever since there has been a written
history, the state appears not only as the creation of society but also as
its support. The first step that child-like thought had made in this order
of considerations is in this statement: That which governs is also that which
creates.




If, moreover, we make an exception of certain short periods of democracy
exercised with the vivid consciousness of popular sovereignty, as was the
case in a few Greek cities, especially at Athens, and in a few Italian cities,
and especially Florence (the former nevertheless were composed of free men
were proprietors of slaves, and the latter of privileged citizens who exploited
foreigners and peasants) the society organized into a state was always composed
of a majority at the mercy of the minority. And thus the majority of men
has appeared in history as a mass sustained, governed, guided, exploited
and ill treated, or at least as a variegated conglomeration of interests,
which a few had to govern, maintaining in equilibrium the divergences, either
by pressure or by compensation.




Thence the necessity of an art of government, and as it is this before
all else which strikes those who are studying collective life, it was natural
that politics should appear as the author of the social order and as the
sign of the continuity in the succession of historic forms. To say politics
is to say activity, which, up to a certain point, is exercised in a desired
direction, until the moment at least when calculations dash themselves against
unknown or unexpected obstacles. By taking the state as an imperfect experience
would suggest for the author of society, and politics for the author of the
social order, it resulted that the narrators or philosophical historians
were driven to place the essence of history in a succession of forms, institutions
and political ideas.




Whence the state drew its origin, where the basis of its performance was
found, that mattered not, as that matters not in current reasoning. The problems
of the genetic order arose, as is known, rather late. The state is and it
finds its reason for existence in its present necessity; that is so true
that the imagination has not been able to adapt itself to the idea that it
has not always existed, and so it has prolonged its conjectural existence
back to the first origins of the human race. The gods or demigods and heroes
were its founders, in mythology at least, just as in mediaeval theology the
Pope is the first and therefore the divine and perpetual source of all authority.
Even in our time, inexperienced travelers and imbecile missionaries find
the state where there is, as among savages and barbarians, nothing but the
gens, or the tribe of gentes, or the alliance of gentes.




Two things were necessary that these prejudices of the judgment should
be overcome. In the first place, it was necessary to recognize that the functions
of the state arise, increase, diminish, alter and follow each other with
the variations of certain social conditions. In the second place, it was
necessary to arrive at a comprehension of the fact that the state exists
and maintains itself in that it is organized for the defense of certain definite
interests, of one part of society against all the rest of society itself,
which must be made in such a way, in its entirety, that the resistance of
the subjects, of the ill-treated and the exploited, either is lost in multiple
frictions, or is tempered by the partial advantages, wretched though they
be, to the oppressed themselves. Politics, that art so miraculous and so
admired, thus brings us back to a very simple formula; to apply a force or
a system of forces to the total of resistances.




The first step, and the most difficult, is taken when the state has been
reduced to the social conditions whence it draws its origin. But these social
conditions themselves have been subsequently defined by the theory of classes,
the genesis of which is in the manner of the different occupations, granted
the distribution of labor, that is to say, granted the relations which co-ordinate
and bind men together in a definite form of production.




Thenceforth the concept of the state has ceased to represent the direct
cause of the historic movement as the presumed author of society, because
it has been seen that in each of its forms and its variations there is nothing
else than the positive and forced organization of a definite class rule,
or of a definite compact between different classes. And then by an ulterior
consequence from these premises, it is finally to be recognized that politics,
as the art of acting in a desired direction, is a comparatively small part
of the general movement of history, and that it is but a feeble part of the
formation and the development of the state itself, in which many things,
that is to say, many relations, arise and develop by necessary compact, by
a tacit consent, or by violence endured and tolerated. The reign of the unconscious,
if by that we mean what is not decreed by free choice and forethought, but
what is determined and accomplished by a succession of habits, customs, compacts,
etc., has become very considerable in the domain of the data which form the
object of the historic sciences; and politics, which has been taken as an
explanation, has itself become something to explain.




We know now in a positive way the reasons in consequence of which history
had necessarily to appear under a purely political form.




But this does not mean that we ought to believe that the state is a simple
excrescence, a mere accessory of the social body, or of free association,
as so many Utopians and so many ultra-liberal thinkers of anarchist tendencies
have imagined. If society has thus far culminated in the state, it is because
it has had need of this complement of force and authority, because it is
at first composed of units which are unequal by reason of economic differentiations.
The state is something very real, a system of forces which maintain equilibrium
and impose it through violence and repression. And to exist as a system of
forces it has been compelled to develop and to establish an economic power,
whether this latter rests upon robbery, the result of war, or whether it
consists in direct property in the domain, or whether it is constituted little
by little, thanks to the modern method of public taxes, which takes on the
constitutional appearance of a self-imposed system of taxation. It is in
this economic power, so considerable in modern times, that its capacity for
acting is founded. It results, that by reason of a new division of labor,
the functions of state give rise to special orders and conditions, that is
to say, to very particular classes, without including the class of parasites.




The state, which is and which must be an economic power that in its defense
of the ruling classes it may be furnished with means to repress, to govern,
to administer and to make war, creates in a direct or an indirect manner
an aggregation of new and particular interests, which necessarily react upon
society. Thus the state, by the fact that it has arisen and that it maintains
itself as a guaranty of the social antitheses, which are a consequence of
economic differentiations, creates around itself a circle of persons interested
directly in its existence.




Two consequences follow therefrom. As society is not a homogeneous whole,
but a body of specialized articulations, or, rather, a multiform complexus
of objects and interests, it happens that sometimes the directors of the
state seek to isolate themselves, and by this isolation they oppose themselves
to the whole of society, and then, in the second place, it happens that organs
and functions, created first for the advantage of all, end by no longer serving
any interest but those of groups, and permit abuses of power on the part
of coteries and camorras. Thence arise aristocracies and hierarchies born
from the use of the public power, thence arise dynasties; in the light of
simple logic these formations appear wholly irrational.




From the first beginnings of written history the state has increased or
diminished its powers, but it has never disappeared, because ever since there
have been, in the society of men unequal in consequence of economic differentiation,
reasons for maintaining, and for defending, through force or conquest, slavery,
monopolies, or the predominance of one form of production, with the domination
of man over man. The state has become, as it were, the field of an endless
civil war, which is developing always, even if it does not always show itself
under the startling form of Marius and Sylla, days of June and wars of Secession.
Within the state, the corruption of man by man has always flourished, because,
if there is no form of domination which does not meet resistance, there are
no forms of resistance which, in consequence of the pressing needs of life,
may not degenerate into a passive compact.




For these reasons, historic events, seen on the surface of the ordinary
monotonous narrative, appear like the repetition of the same type, with few
variations, like a series of kaleidoscopic pictures. We need not be astonished
if the idealistic Herbart and the caustic or pessimistic Schopenhauer arrived
at this conclusion, that there is no history, in the sense of any actual
processus, which is to say in common language history is a tiresome song.




When political history is once reduced to its quintessence, the state
remains illuminated in all its prose. Thenceforth there is no more trace
either of theological divination, nor of metaphysical transubstantiation,
so much in vogue among certain German philosophers -- for whom the state
is the Idea, the State Idea which is realized in history, the state is the
full realization of the personality, and other stupidities of the same sort.
The state is a real organization of defense to guarantee and perpetuate a
mode of association, the foundation of which is a form of economic production,
or a compact and a transaction between forms. To sum up, the state assumes
either a system of property, or a compact between several systems of property.
There is the foundation of all its art, the exercise of which demands that
the state itself became an economic power, and that it also dispose of means
and processes to make property pass from the hands of some into the hands
of others. When, by the effect of an acute and violent change of the forms
of production, it is necessary to resort to an unusual and extraordinary
readjustment of the relations of property (for example, the abolition of
mortmain and fiefs, the abolition of commercial monopolies), then the old
political form is insufficient and revolution is necessary to create a new
organ which may operate the new economic transformation.




If we make an exception of the very ancient times which are unknown to
us, all history is developed in the contacts and the antagonisms of the different
tribes and communities, and thereafter of the different nations and different
states; that is to say, that the reasons for the internal antitheses in the
circle of each society are always more and more complicated with frictions
with the outside world. These two reasons for antagonism condition each other
reciprocally, but in ways which are always varying. Often it is internal
disturbance which urges a community or a city to enter into external collisions;
at other times it is these collisions which alter the internal relations.




The principal motive for the different relations between the different
communities has been from the beginnings, even as it is to-day, commerce
in the broad sense of the word, that is to say, exchange, whether it is a
matter of giving up, as in the poor tribes, merely the surplus in exchange
for other things, or whether it is a matter, as to-day, of production on
a large scale, which is carried on with the exclusive intention of selling
so as to draw from a sum of money a larger sum of money. This enormous mass
of events exterior and interior, which accumulate and pile upon each other
in history, is such a trouble to the historians who content themselves with
exploring it and summarizing it, that they become lost in the infinite attempts
at chronological groups and bird's-eye views. Whoever, on the contrary, knows
the internal development of the different social types in their economic
structure, and who considers political events as the particular results of
the forces acting in society, ends by triumphing over the confusion born
out of the multiplicity and the uncertainty of first impressions, and instead
of a chronological or synchronous series, or a view of the whole, he can
arrive at the concrete series of a real processus.




In the presence of these realistic conditions all the ideologies founded
on the ethical mission of the state or on any such conception, fall to the
ground. The state is, so to speak, fitted into its place, and it remains
encased, as it were, in the surroundings of the social development, in its
capacity of a form resulting from other conditions, and in its turn, by reason
of its existence, reacting naturally upon the rest.




Here arises another question.




Will this form ever be outgrown? -- or can there be a society without
a state? -- or can there be a society without classes? -- and if we must
be more explicit, will there ever be a form of communist production with
a distribution of labor and of tasks such that there will be no room in it
for the development of inequalities, that source of domination of man over
man?




It is in the affirmative answer to this question that scientific socialism
consists, in so far as it affirms the coming of communistic production, not
as a postulate, nor as the aim of a free volition, but as the result of the
processus immanent in history.




As is well known, the premise of this prevision is in the actual conditions
of present capitalist production. This, socializing continually the mode
of production, has subjected living labor more and more with its regulations
to the objective conditions of the technical process, it has day after day
concentrated the property in the means of production more and ever more into
the hands of a few, who as stockholders, or speculators, are always found
to be more and more removed from immediate labor, the direction of which
passes over to intelligence and science. With the increased consciousness
of this situation among the proletarians, whose instruction in solidarity
comes from the actual conditions of their employment, and with the decrease
of the capacity of the holders of capital to preserve the private direction
of productive labor, a moment will come, when in one fashion or another,
with the elimination in every form of private rent, interest, profit, the
production will pass over to the collectivist association, that is to say,
will become communistic. Thus will disappear all inequalities, except those
of sex, age, temperament and capacity, that is to say, all those inequalities
will cease which engender economic classes, or which are engendered by them,
and the disappearance of classes will put an end to the possibility of the
state, as domination of man over man. The technical and pedagogical government
of intelligence will form the only organization of society.




In this fashion, scientific socialism, in an ideal fashion at least, has
triumphed over the state; and its triumph has given it a complete knowledge
both of its mode of origin and the reasons for its natural disappearance.
It has understood it precisely because it does not rise up against it in
a one-sided and subjective fashion, as did more than once, at different epochs,
the cynics, the stoics, the epicureans of all sorts, the religious sectaries,
the visionary monks, the utopians and finally, in our days, the anarchists
of every stripe. Still more, instead of rising up against it, scientific
socialism is proposing to show how the state continually rises up of itself
against itself, by creating in the means with which it cannot dispense, as,
for example, a colossal system of taxation, militarism, universal suffrage,
the development of education, etc., the conditions of its own ruin. The society
which has produced it will reabsorb it; that is to say, that just as society
in organizing a new form of production will eliminate the antagonisms between
capital and labor, so, with the disappearance of proletarians and the conditions
which render proletarians possible, will disappear all dependence of men
upon his fellow man in any form of hierarchy, whatever it may be.




The terms in which the genesis and the development of the state evolve,
from its initial point of appearance in a particular community, where economic
differentiation is beginning, up to the moment where this disappearance begins
to foreshadow itself, make it henceforth intelligible to us.




The State has been reduced till it is but a necessary complement of certain
definite economic forms, and thus the theory which would have seen in it
an independent factor in history is thenceforth forever eliminated.




It is henceforth relatively easy to take account of the fashion in which
law has been raised up to the rank of a decisive factor of society, and thus
of history, directly or indirectly.




Before all else, we must remember in what fashion arose this philosophic
conception of justice generalized, which is the principal foundation of the
theory which maintains that history is dominated by the progress of independent
legislation.




With the precocious dissolution of the feudal society in certain parts
of Central and Northern Italy, and with the birth of the Communes, which
were republics of production grouped in trade guilds and merchant guilds,
the Roman law was forced into a place of honor. This law flowered anew in
the Universities. It entered into a struggle with the barbaric laws and also
in part with the canon law; it was then evidently a form of thought which
answered better to the needs of the bourgeoisie, which was beginning to develop.




In fact, considering the peculiarities of rival laws, which were either
customs of barbarous nations, or corporation privileges, or papal or imperial
concessions, this law appeared as the universality of written reason. Had
it not arrived at the point of regarding human personality in its most abstract
and human relations, since a certain Titius is capable of becoming debtor
and creditor, of selling and buying, of making a cession, a donation, etc.?
Roman law, although elaborated in its last editing at the command of emperors
by servile parasites, appeared then, amid the decline of mediaeval institutions,
as a revolutionary force, and as such it constituted a great step of progress.
This law, so universal that it gave the means of overthrowing barbaric laws,
was certainly a law which corresponded to human nature considered under its
generic relations; and by its opposition to private laws and privileges it
appeared as a natural law.




We know, moreover, how this ideology of natural law arose. It acquired
its greatest distinction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but
it had long been prepared for by the jurisprudence which took for its base
the Roman law, whether it adopted it, revised it, or corrected it. To the
formation of the ideology of natural law another element contributed, the
Greek philosophy of later epochs. The Greeks, who were the inventors of those
definite arts of the mind which are sciences, never, as is known, drew from
their multiple local laws a discipline corresponding to that which we call
the science of law. On the contrary, by the rapid progress of abstract research
in the circle of their democracies, they arrived very soon at a logical,
rhetorical and pedagogical discussion on the nature of justice, the state,
the law, penalty; and in their philosophy we may trace the rudimentary forms
of all later discussions. But it is not until later, that is to say, in the
Hellenistic epoch, when the limits of Greek life were sufficiently enlarged
to be mingled with those of the civilized world, that, in the cosmopolitan
environment which carried with it the need of searching in each man for the
generic man, the rationalism of justice arose -- of justice or of natural
right in the form given it by the stoic philosophy. The Greek rationalism
which had already furnished a certain formal element to the logical codification
of Roman law reappeared in the eighteenth century in the doctrine of natural
right.




That ideology, whose criticism has served as an arm and an instrument
for giving a juridical form to the economic organization of modern society,
has had, consequently, various sources. Yet, in fact, this juridical ideology
reflects, in the struggle for law and against law, the revolutionary period
of the bourgeois spirit. And, although it takes its doctrinal point of departure
in a return to the traditions of the ancient philosophy, in the generalization
of Roman jurisprudence, in everything else, and in all its development, it
is completely new and modern. Roman law, although it was generalized by scholasticism
and by modern elaboration, still remains within itself a collection of special
cases which have not been deduced according to a preconceived system, nor
preordained by the systematic mind of the legislator. On the other hand,
the rationalism of the stoics, their contemporaries and their disciples,
was a work of pure contemplation, and it produced no revolutionary movement
around it. The ideology of natural law, which finally took the name of philosophy
of law, was, on the contrary, systematic, it started always from general
formulae, it was aggressive and polemic, and still more, it was at war with
orthodoxy, with intolerance, with privilege, with constituted bodies; in
fine, it fought for the liberties which to-day constitute the formal conditions
of modern society. It is with this ideology, which was a method of struggle,
that arose for the first time, in a typical and decisive form, that idea
that there is a law which is one and the same with reason. The laws against
which the struggle was carried on appear as deviations, backward steps, errors.




From this faith in rational law arose the blind belief in the power of
the legislator, which grew into fanaticism at the critical moments of the
French Revolution.




Thence the belief that society as a whole is to be submitted to one single
law, equal for all, systematic, logical, consistent. Thence the conviction
that a law guaranteeing to all a legal equality, that is to say, the privilege
of contracting, guaranteed also liberty to all.




The triumph of true law assures the triumph of reason, and the society
which is regulated by a law equal for all is a perfect society!




It is useless to say that there were illusions at the bottom of these
tendencies. We all know to what this universal liberation of men was to lead.
But what is most important here is the fact that these persuasions arose
from a conception of law, which considered it as detached from the social
causes which produced it. Likewise that reason, to which these ideologies
appealed, reduced itself to relieving labor, association, traffic, commerce,
political forms and conscience from all limits and all obstacles which prevented
free competition. I have already shown in another chapter how the great Revolution
of the eighteenth century may serve us for experience. And if there is still
some one to-day who insists on speaking of a rational law which dominates
history, of a law, in short, which would be a factor, instead of being a
simple fact in historic revolution, that means that he is living out of our
time and that he has not understood that our liberal and equalitarian codification
has already, in fact, marked the end and the term of that whole school of
natural law.




By different ways we have arrived in this century at reducing law, considered
previously as a rational thing, into a material thing, and thus into a thing
corresponding to definite social conditions.




In the first place, the interest in history gained in extent and in depth,
and it led students to recognize that to understand the origins of law, it
was not sufficient to stop at the data of pure reason, nor at the study of
Roman law alone. Barbaric laws, the usages and customs of nations and societies,
so despised by the rationalists, have been theoretically restored to honor.
That was the only way to arrive, through the study of the most ancient forms,
at an understanding of how the most recent forms could have been successively
produced.




Codified Roman law is a very modern form; that personality, which it assumes
as a universal subject, is an elaboration of a very advanced epoch, in which
the cosmopolitanism of social relations was dominated by a military-bureaucratic
constitution. In this environment, in which a written code of reason had
been built up, there was no longer any trace of spontaneity or popular life,
there was no more democracy. This same law, before arriving at this crystallization,
had arisen and had developed; and if we study it in its origins and in its
developments, and especially if, in this study, we employ the comparative
method, we recognize that, upon many points, it is analogous to the institutions
of inferior societies and nations. It therefore becomes evident that the
true science of law can be nothing less than the genetic history of the law
itself.




But, while the European continent had created in the codification of civil
law the type and the textbook of practical bourgeois judgment, was there
not in England another self- originating form of law, which arose and developed
in a purely practical manner, from the very conditions of the society which
produced it without system, and without the action of methodical rationalism
having any part in it. The law, which actually exists and is applied, is
therefore a much simpler and much more modest thing than was imagined by
the enthusiasts who sing the praises of written judgment, of the empire of
reason. For their defense, it must not be forgotten that they were the ideal
precursors of the great Revolution. For ideology it was necessary to substitute
the history of legal institutions. The philosophy of law ended with Hegel;
and if objectors mention the books published since, I reply that the works
published by professors are not always the index of the progress of thought.
The philosophy of law thus became the philosophical study of the history
of law. And it is not necessary to repeat here again how historic philosophy
ended in economic materialism and in what sense critical communism is the
reversal of Hegel.




This revolution, apparently a revolution in ideas alone, is merely an
intellectual reflection of the revolutions which have been produced in practical
life.




In our century, legislating has become an epidemic; and reason enthroned
in legal ideology has been dethroned by parliaments. In these the antitheses
of class interests have taken on the form of parties; and the parties struggle
for or against definite laws; and all law appears as a simple fact, or as
a thing which it is useful or not useful to do.




The proletariat has arisen; and wherever the struggle of the laborers
has taken definite form, the bourgeois codes have been convicted of falsehood.
Written judgment has shown itself powerless to save the wage-workers from
the oscillations of the market, to guarantee women and children against the
oppressive hours of the factories, or to find an expedient to solve the problem
of forced idleness. The partial limitation of the hours of labor has, itself
alone, been the subject and the occasion of a gigantic struggle. The small
and the large bourgeoisie, agrarians and manufacturers, advocates of the
poor and defenders of accumulated wealth, monarchists and democrats, socialists
and reactionaries, have bitterly contended over extracting profit from the
action of the public authorities and over exploiting the contingencies of
politics and parliamentary intrigue, to find the guaranty and the defense
of certain definite interests in the interpretation of existing law, or in
the creation of a new law. This new legislation has more than once been revised,
and the strangest oscillations may be observed in it; extending from the
humanitarianism which defends the poor and even animals, to the promulgation
of martial law. Justice has been stripped of its mask and has become merely
a profane thing.




The consciousness of experience has come to us and has given us a formula
as precise as it is modest; every rule of law has been and is the customary,
authoritative, or judicial defense of a definite interest; the reduction
of law to economics is then almost immediately accomplished.




If the materialistic conception finally came to furnish to these tendencies
an explicit and systematic view, it is because its orientation has been determined
by the visual angle of the proletariat. This last is the necessary product
and the indispensable condition of a society in which all the persons are,
from an abstract point of view, equal before the law, but where the material
conditions of development and the liberties of each are unequal. The proletarians
are the forces through which the accumulated means of production reproduce
themselves and reconstitute themselves into new wealth; but they themselves
live only by enrolling themselves under the authority of capital; and from
one day to the next they find themselves out of work, impoverished and exiles.
They are the army of social labor, but their chiefs are their masters. They
are the negation of justice in the empire of law, that is to say, that they
are the irrational element in the pretended domain of reason.




History then has not been a processus for arriving at the empire of reason
in law; it has thus far been nothing else than a series of changes in the
form of subjection and servitude. History then consists entirely in the struggle
of interests, and law is but the authoritative expression of the interests
which have triumphed.




These formulae indeed do not permit us to explain, by the immediate examination
of the various interests which are at its base, every particular law which
has appeared in history. The facts of history are very complicated; but these
general formula suffice to indicate the style and the method of research
which has been substituted for legal ideology.




IX




Here I must give certain formulae.




Granted the conditions of the development of labor and the instruments
appropriated to it, the economic structure of society, that is to say, the
form of production of the immediate means of life, determines, on an artificial
field, in the first place and directly, all the rest of the practical activity
of those associated, and the variation of this activity in the processus
which we call history, that is to say -- the formation, the frictions, the
struggles and the erosions of the classes; the corresponding regulations
relative to law and morality; and the reasons and modes of subordination
and subjection of men toward men and the corresponding exercise of dominion
and authority, in fine, that which gives birth to the State and that which
constitutes it. It determines, in the second place, the tendency and in great
part, in an indirect fashion, the objects of imagination and of thought in
the production of art, religion and science.




The products of the first and of the second stage, in consequence of the
interests which they create, the habits which they engender, the persons
whom they group and whose spirit and inclinations they specify, tend to fix
themselves and isolate themselves as independent entities; and thence comes
that empirical view, according to which different independent factors, having
an efficacy and a rhythmic movement of their own, contribute to form the
historic processus and the social configurations which successively result
from it. It is the social classes, in so far as they consist in differentiations
of interests, which unfold in definite ways and in forms of opposition (whence
come the friction, the movement, the process and the progress), which have
been the factors -- if it was ever necessary to employ this expression --
the real, proper and positive factors of history, from the disappearance
of primitive communism until to-day.




The variations of the underlying (economic) structure of society which,
at first sight, show themselves intuitively in the agitation of the passions,
develop consciously in the struggles against law and for law, and become
realized in the shaking and in the ruin of a definite political organization,
have in reality their adequate expression only in the change in the relations
which exist between the different social classes. And these relations change
with the change of the relations which previously existed between the productivity
of labor and the (legal-political) conditions of co-ordination of those who
co-operate in production.




And finally, these connections between the productivity of labor and the
co-ordination of those who co-operate in it are changed with the changing
of the instruments -- in the broad sense of the word -- necessary to production.
The processus and the progress of technique, as they are the index, are also
the condition of all the other processus and of all progress.




Society is for us a fact, which we cannot solve, unless it be by that
analysis which reduces the complex forms to the simpler forms, the modern
forms to the older forms: but that is to remain always, nevertheless, in
a society which exists. History is but the history of society -- that is
to say, the history of the variations of human co-operation, from the primitive
horde down to the modern State, from the immediate struggle against nature,
by the means of a few very simple tools, down to the present economic structure,
which reduces itself to these two poles; accumulated labor (capital) and
living labor (proletarians). To resolve the social complexus into simple
individuals, and to reconstruct it afterwards by the acts of free and voluntary
thought; to construct, in fine, society with its reasons, is to misunderstand
the objective nature and the immanence of the historic processus.




Revolutions, in the broadest sense of the word, and in the specific sense
of the destruction of a political organization, mark the real and proper
dates of historic epochs. Seen from afar, in their elements, in their preparation
and their effects, at long range, they may appear to us as moments of a constant
evolution, with minute variations; but considered in themselves, they are
definite and precise catastrophes, and it is only as catastrophes that they
are historic events.




X




Affirmations of this sort, announced with this nudity and crudity, have
already for some time passed from mouth to mouth, and they are a convenient
assistance to the adversaries of materialism, who use them as a bugbear.
The slothful, whose number is great even among the intellectuals, willingly
fit themselves to this clumsy acceptance of such declarations. What a delight
for all careless persons to possess, once for all, summed up in a few propositions,
the whole of knowledge, and to be able with one single key to penetrate all
the secrets of life! All the problems of ethics, esthetics, philology, critical
history and philosophy reduced to one single problem and freed thus from
all difficulties!




In this way the simpletons might reduce the whole of history to commercial
arithmetic; and finally a new and authentic interpretation of Dante might
give us the Divine Comedy illustrated with the process of manufacturing pieces
of cloth which the wily Florentine merchants sold for their greater profit!




The truth is that the declarations which involve problems are converted
very easily into vulgar paradoxes in the heads of those who are not accustomed
to triumph over the difficulties of thought by the methodical use of appropriate
means. I shall speak here, in general terms, of these problems, but, as it
were, by aphorisms; and certainly I do not propose to write an encyclopedia
in this short essay.




And first of all, ethics.




I do not mean systems and catechisms, religious or philosophic. Both of
these have been and are above the ordinary and profane course of human events
in most cases, as Utopias are above things. Neither do I speak of those formal
analyses of ethical relations, which have been elaborated from the Sophists
down to Herbart. This is science and not life. And it is formal science,
like logic, geometry and grammar. The one who latest and with so much profundity
defined these ethical relations (Herbart), knew well that ideas, that is
to say, the formal points of view of the moral judgment, are in themselves
powerless. Therefore he put into the circumstances of life and into the pedagogic
formation of character the reality of ethics. He might have been taken for
Owen if he had not been a retrograde.




I am speaking of that ethics which exists prosaically and in an empirical
and current fashion, in the inclinations, the habits, the customs, the counsels,
the judgments and the appreciations of ordinary mortals. I am speaking of
that ethics which as suggestion, as impulse and as bridle, appears in different
degrees of development, and more or less unmistakably, although in a fragmentary
fashion, among all men; but the very fact of association because each occupies
a definite position in the association, they naturally and necessarily reflect
upon their own works and the works of others, and they conceive obligations
and appreciations and all the first elements of general precepts.




There is the factum; and what is most important is that this factum appears
to us varied and multiple in the different conditions of life, and variable
through history. This factum is the datum of research. Facts are neither
true nor false, as Aristotle already knew. Systems, on the contrary, theologic
or rational, may be true or false because they aim to comprehend, explain
and complete the fact, by bringing that fact to another fact, or integrating
it with another.




Some points of preliminary theory are henceforth settled, in all that
concerns the interpretation of this factum.




The will does not choose of itself, as was supposed by the inventors of
free will, that product of the impotency of the psychological analysis not
yet arrived at maturity. Volitions, in so far as they are facts of consciousness,
are particular expressions of the psychic mechanism. They are a result, first
of necessities, and then, of all that precedes them up to the very elementary
organic impulse.




Ethics does not place itself nor does it engender itself. There is no
such universal foundation of the ethical relations varied and variable, as
that spiritual entity which has been called the moral conscience, one and
unique for all men. This abstract entity has been eliminated by criticism
like all other such entities, that is to say, like all the faculties of the
soul. What a beautiful explanation of the fact, in truth, to assume the generalization
of the fact itself as a means of explanation. People reasoned thus: the sensations,
the perceptions, the intuitions at a certain moment are found imagined, that
is to say, changed in their form, therefore the imagination has transformed
them. To this class of inventions belongs the moral conscience, which was
accepted as a postulate of the ethical estimates, which are always conditioned.
The moral conscience which really exists is an empirical fact; it is an index
or a summary of the relative ethical formation of each individual. If there
can be in it material for science, this cannot explain the ethical relations
by means of the conscience, but the very thing it needs is to understand
how that conscience is formed.




If volitions are derived, and if morality results from the conditions
of life, ethics, in its completeness, is but a formation; its problem is
altogether pedagogic.




There is a pedagogy which I will call individualistic and subjective,
which, granted the generic conditions of human perfectibility, constructs
abstract rules by which men, who are still in a period of formation, may
be led to be strong, courageous, truthful, just, benevolent, and so on through
the entire extent of the cardinal or secondary virtues. But again, can subjective
pedagogy construct of itself a social background upon which all these beautiful
things ought to be realized? If it constructs it, it simply elaborates a
Utopia.




And, in truth, the human race, in the rigid course of its development,
never had time nor occasion to go to the school of Plato or of Owen, of Pestalozzi
or Herbart. It has done as it has been forced to do. Considered in an abstract
manner, all men can be educated and all are perfectible; as a matter of fact,
they have always been perfected and instructed as much as and in the measure
that they could, granted the conditions of life in which they were obliged
to develop. It is here precisely that the word environment is not a metaphor,
and that the use of the word compact is not metaphorical. Real morality always
presents itself as something conditioned and limited, which the imagination
has sought to outgrow, by constructing Utopias, and by creating a supernatural
pedagogue, or a miraculous redemption.




Why should the slave have had the ways of seeing and the passions and
the sentiments of the master whom he feared? How could the peasant relieve
himself of his invincible superstitions, to which he was condemned by his
immediate dependence upon nature and his mediate dependence upon a social
mechanism unknown to him, and by his blind faith in the priest, who stands
to him as a magician and sorcerer. In what fashion could the modern proletarian
of the great industrial cities, exposed continuously to the alternatives
of misery or subjection, how could he realize that way of living, regulated
and monotonous, which was the one suited to the members of the trade guilds,
whose existence seemed imbedded in a providential plan? From what intuitive
elements of experience could the hog merchant of Chicago, who furnishes Europe
with so many products at a cheap rate, extract the conditions of serenity
and intellectual elevation which gave to the Athenian the qualities of the
noble and good man, and to the Roman citizen, the dignity of heroism? What
power of docile Christian persuasion will extract from the souls of the modern
proletarians their natural reasons of hate against their determined or undetermined
oppressors? If they wish that justice be done, they must appeal to violence;
and before the love of one's neighbor as a universal law can appear possible
to them, they must imagine a life very different from the present life which
makes a necessity of hatred. In this society of differentiations, hatred,
pride, hypocrisy, falsehood, baseness, injustice and all the catechism of
the cardinal vices and their accessories make a sad appendage to the morality,
equal for all, upon which they constitute the satire.




Ethics then reduces itself for us to the historical study of the subjective
and objective conditions of how morality develops or meets obstacles to its
development. In this only, that is to say, within these limits, we can recognize
some value in the affirmation that morality corresponds to the social situations,
and, in the last analysis, to the economic conditions. Only an idiot could
believe that the individual morality of each one is proportionate to his
individual economic situation. That is not only empirically false, but intrinsically
irrational. Granted the natural elasticity of the psychic mechanism, and
also the fact that no one lives so shut up in his own class that he does
not undergo the influence of other classes, of the common environment and
of the interlacing traditions, it is never possible to reduce the development
of each individual to the abstract and generic type of his class and his
social status. We are dealing there with the phenomena of the mass, of those
phenomena which form, or should form, the objects of moral statistics: the
discipline which has thus far remained incomplete, because it has taken for
the objects of its combinations groups which it creates of itself by the
addition of numbers of cases (for example, adulteries, thefts, homicides)
and not the groups which, as classes, conditions, or situations exist really,
that is to say, socially.




To recommend morality to men while assuming or ignoring their conditions,
this was hitherto the object and the class of argument of all the catechists.
To recognize that these are given by the social environment, that is what
the communists oppose to the utopia and the hypocrisy of the preachers of
morality. And as they see in morality not a privilege of the elect, nor a
gift of nature, but a result of experience and education, they admit human
perfectibility through reasons and arguments which are, in my opinion, more
moral and more ideal than those which have been given by the ideologists.




In other words, man develops, or produces himself, not as an entity generically
provided with certain attributes, which repeat themselves, or develop themselves,
according to a rational rhythm, but he produces and develops himself as at
once cause and effect, as author and consequence, of certain definite conditions,
in which are engendered also definite currents of ideas, of opinions, of
beliefs, of imaginations, of expectations, of maxims. Thence arise ideologies
of every sort, as also the generalization of morality in catechisms, in canons
and in systems. We must not be surprised if these ideologies, once arisen,
are afterwards cultivated alone by themselves, if they finally appear, as
it were, detached from the living field whence they took their birth, nor
if they hold themselves above man as imperative rules and models.




The priests and the doctrinaires of every sort have given themselves for
centuries to this labor of abstraction, and have forced themselves to maintain
the resulting illusions. Now that the positive sources of all ideologies
have been found in the mechanism of life itself, we must explain realistically
their mode of generation. And as that is true of all ideologies, it is true
also and, in particular of those which consist in projecting ethical estimates
beyond their natural and direct limits, making of them anticipations of divine
announcements or presuppositions of universal suggestions of conscience.




Therein lies the object of the special historic problems. We cannot always
find the tie which unites certain ethical ideas to practical definite conditions.
The concrete social psychology of past times often remains impenetrable to
us. Often the commonest things remain for us unintelligible, for example,
the animals considered as unclean, or the origin for the repugnance at marriage
between persons of remote degrees of relationship. A prudent course of study
leads us to conclude that the motives of many details will remain always
concealed. Ignorance, superstition, singular illusions, symbolisms, these
with many others are causes of that unconscious element, often found in customs,
which now constitutes for us the unknown and the unknowable.




The principal cause of all difficulty is precisely in the tardy appearance
of what we call reason, so that the traces of the proximate motives of ideas
have been lost or have remained enveloped in the ideas themselves.




On the subject of science we can be much more brief.




For a long time history has been made in an artless fashion. Granted and
admitted that the different sciences have their statements in manuals and
encyclopedias, it seemed sufficient to work out chronologically the appearance
of the different formulas, resolving the total of the systematic summary
into the elements which have successively served to compose it. The general
presupposition was simple enough; underneath this chronology is the rational
conception which develops and progresses.




This method, if so it could be called, had within itself a certain disadvantage;
it permitted us at best to understand how, one stage of science being granted,
another stage of science may be derived from it by reason, but it did not
permit us to discern by what condition of facts men were driven to discover
science for the first time, that is to say, to reduce considered experience
into a new and definite form. The question was, then, to find why there is
an actual history of science, to find the origin of the scientific necessity,
and what unites in a genetic fashion that necessity to our necessities in
the continuity of the social processus.




The great progress of modern technique, which really constitutes the intellectual
substance of the bourgeois epoch, has worked, among other miracles, this
one also, of revealing to us for the first time the practical origin of the
scientific attitude. (We can never forget the Florentine Academy, which produced
this phrase, when Italy was in the twilight of its past grandeur and when
modern society was in the dawn of the great industry.) Henceforth we are
in a position to take up the guiding thread of what, by abstraction, is called
the scientific spirit; and no one is any longer astonished at finding that
everything in scientific discoveries has come about, as was the case in other
primitive times, when the clumsy elementary geometry of the Egyptians arose
from the necessity of measuring the fields exposed to the annual inundations
of the Nile, and when the periodicity of these inundations suggested, in
Egypt and in Babylon, the discovery of the rudiments of the astronomical
movements.




It is certainly true that when science is once created and partially ripened,
as had already happened in the Hellenic period, the work of abstraction,
of deduction and of combination continues among scientists in such a way
that it possibly obliterates the consciousness of the social causes of the
first production of science itself. But if we examine in their main features
the epochs of the development of science, and if we confront the periods
which the ideologists would characterize as periods of progress and of retrogression
of intelligence, we perceive clearly the social reason for the impulses,
sometimes increasing, sometimes decreasing, toward scientific activity. What
need had the feudal society of Western Europe for this ancient science, which
the Byzantines preserved, at least materially, while the Arabs, free agriculturists,
industrious artisans, or skillful merchants, had succeeded in increasing
it a little? What is the Renaissance, if not the joining of the initiatory
movement of the bourgeoisie to the traditions of ancient learning, which
had become usable? What is all the accelerated movement of scientific knowledge,
since the seventeenth century, but the series of acts accomplished by intelligence,
refilled by experience, to assure human labor, in the forms of an improved
technique, the dominion over natural forces and conditions? Thence arises
the war against darkness, superstition, the Church, religion; thence arise
naturalism, atheism, materialism; thence the installation of the domain of
reason. The bourgeois epoch is the epoch of minds in full play. (Vico) It
is worth remembering that this government of the Directory, which was the
prototype and the compendium of all liberal corruption, was the first to
introduce in the University and at the Academy in a formal and solemn fashion
the science of free inquiry with Lamark! This science, which the bourgeois
epoch has, through its inherent conditions, stimulated and made to grow like
a giant, is the only heritage of past centuries which communism accepts and
adopts without reserve.




It would not be useful to stop here for the discussion of the so-called
antithesis between science and philosophy. If we accept those fashions of
philosophizing which are confounded with mysticism and theology, philosophy
never means a science or doctrine separate from its appropriate and particular
things, but it is simply a degree, a form, a stage of thought with relation
to the things which enter into the domain of experience. Philosophy is, then,
either a generic anticipation of the problems which science has still to
elaborate specifically, or a summary and a conceptual elaboration of the
results at which the sciences have already arrived. As for those who, that
they may not appear behind the times, talk now of scientific philosophy,
if we do not wish to stop over the humorous element that there is in that
expression, it will suffice to say that they are simply fools.




I said some pages back, in my statement of formulas, that the economic
structure determines in the second place the direction, and in great part
and indirectly, the objects of imagination and of thought in the production
of art, of religion and of science. To express this otherwise, or to go further,
would be to put one's self voluntarily on the road toward the absurd.




Before all else, in this formula, we are opposing the fantastic opinion,
that art, religion and science are subjective developments and historical
developments of a pretended artistic, religious or scientific spirit, which
would go on manifesting itself successively through its own rhythm of evolution,
favored or retarded on this side or that by material conditions. By this
formula, it is desired to assert, moreover, the necessary connection, through
which every fact of art and of religion is the exponent, sentimental, fantastic
and thus derived, of definite social conditions. If I say in the second place,
it is to distinguish these products from the facts of legal-political order
which are a true and proper projection of economic conditions. And if I say
in great part and indirectly the objects of these activities, it is to indicate
two things: that in artistic or religious production the mediation from the
conditions to the products is very complicated, and again that men, while
living in society, do not thereby cease to live alone by themselves in nature,
and to receive from it occasion and material for curiosity and for imagination.




After all, this is all reduced to a more general formula; man does not
make several histories at the same time, but all these alleged different
histories (art, religion, etc.) make up one alone. And it is not possible
to take account of that clearly except at the characteristic and significant
moment of the production of new things, that is to say in the periods which
I will call revolutionary. Later, the acceptance of the things that have
been produced, and the traditional repetition of a definite type, obliterated
the sense of the origins of things.




Try, if you will, to detach the ideology of the fables, which are at the
foundation of the Homeric poems, from that moment of historic evolution where
we find the dawn of Aryan civilization in the basin of the Mediterranean,
that is to say, from that phase of the higher barbarism in which arises,
in Greece and elsewhere, the epic. Or try to imagine the birth and the development
of Christianity elsewhere than in Roman cosmopolitanism, and otherwise than
by the work of those proletarians, those slaves, those unfortunates those
desperate ones, who had need of the redemption of the Apocalypse and of the
promise of the Kingdom of God. Find, if you will, the ground for supposing
that in the beautiful environment of the Renaissance the romanticism should
begin to appear, which scarcely appeared in the decadent Torquato Tasso;
or that one might attribute to Richardson or to Diderot the novels of Balzac,
in whom appears, as a contemporary of the first generation of socialism and
sociology, the psychology of classes. Far back, farther, farther, at the
first origins of the mythical conceptions, it is evident that Zeus did not
assume the characters of father of gods and men until the power of the patria
potestas was already established, and that series of processus began which
culminated in the State. Zeus thus ceases to be what was at first the simple
divus (brilliant) or the Thunderer. And it is to be observed that at an opposite
point of historic evolution, a great number of thinkers of the past century
reduced to a single abstract God, who is a simple regent of the world, all
that variegated image of the unknown and transcendental type, developed in
so great a wealth of mythological, Christian or pagan creations. Man felt
himself more at home in nature, thanks to experience, but felt himself better
able to penetrate the gearing of society, the knowledge of which he possessed
in part. The miraculous dissolved in his mind, to the point where materialism
and criticism could afterwards eliminate that poor remnant of transcendentalism,
without taking up war against the gods.




There is certainly a history of ideas; but this does not consist in the
vicious circle of ideas that explain themselves. It lies in rising from things
to the idea. There is a problem; still more, there is a multitude of problems,
so varied, multiple, multiform and mingled are the projections which men
have made of themselves and of their economic-social conditions, and thus
of their hopes and their fears, of their desires and their deceptions, in
their artistic and religious concepts. The method is found, but the particular
execution is not easy. We must above all guard against the scholastic temptation
of arriving by deduction at the products of historic activity which are displayed
in art and in religion. We must hope that philosophers like Krug, who explained
the pen with which he wrote by a process of dialectic deduction, have remained
forever buried in the notes of Hegel's logic.




Here I must state certain difficulties.




Before attempting to reduce secondary products (for example, art and religion)
to the social conditions which they idealize, one must first acquire a long
experience of specified social psychology, in which the transformation is
realized. Therein consists the justification of that sum of relations, which
is designated in another form of language, under the name of Egyptian world,
Greek consciousness, spirit of the Renaissance, dominant ideas, psychology
of nations, of society or of classes. When these relations are established,
and men have become accustomed to certain conceptions and certain modes of
belief or of imagination, the ideas transmitted by tradition tend to become
crystallized. Thus they appear as a force which resists new formations; and
as this resistance shows itself through the spoken word, through writing,
through intolerance, through polemics, through persecution, so the struggle
between the new and the old social conditions takes on the form of a struggle
between ideas.




In the second place, through the centuries of history properly so-called,
and as a consequence of the heredity of the pre-history of savagery and of
the conditions of subjection and those of inferiority in which the majority
of men were and are placed, resulted acquiescence in what is traditional,
and the ancient tendencies are perpetuated as obstinate survivals.




In the third place, as I have said, men living socially, do not cease
to live also in nature. They are not, of course, bound to nature as animals
are, because they live on an artificial groundwork. Every one understands,
moreover, that a house is not a cave, that agriculture is not natural pasturage,
and that pharmacy is not exorcism. But nature is always the immediate subsoil
of the artificial groundwork, and it is the environment which contains us.
The industrial arts have put between us social animals, and nature, certain
intermediaries which modify, set aside or remove the natural influences;
but it has not for all that destroyed the efficacy of these, and we continually
feel their effects. And even as we are born men or women, as we die almost
always in spite of ourselves, and as we are dominated by the instinct of
generation, so we also bear in our temperament certain special conditions
which education in the broad sense of the word, or social compact, can modify,
it is true, within certain limits, but which they can never suppress. These
conditions of temperament, repeated in infinite cases throughout the centuries,
constitute what is called the race. For all these reasons, our dependence
upon nature, although it has diminished since prehistoric times, continues
in our social life, just as the food which the sight of nature affords to
the curiosity and the imagination continues also in our social life. Now
these effects of nature, and the sentiments immediate or mediate which result
from it, although they have been perceived, since history began, only on
the visual angle which is given us by the conditions of society, never fail
to reflect themselves in the products of art and of religion, and that adds
to the difficulties of a realistic and complete interpretation of both.




XI




In employing this doctrine as a new principle of research, as a precise
means of defining our position, and as a visual angle, will it really be
possible finally to arrive at a new narrative history? It is not possible
to make an affirmative answer in general to this generic demand. Because,
in fact, if we assume that the critical communist, the sociologist of economic
materialism, or as he is commonly called, the Marxist, has the necessary
critical preparation, the habit of historical study, and also the gift required
for an orderly and vivacious narration, there is no reason for affirming
that he cannot write history, as heretofore the partisans of all other political
schools have written it.




We have the example of Marx, and there is an argument from fact which
admits of no reply. But he was the first and the principal author of the
decisive concepts of this doctrine, reducing it at once into an instrument
of political orientation, in his character of an incomparable publicist,
during the revolutionary period of 1848 to 1850. And then he applied it with
the greatest precision in that essay entitled Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, of which it may be said today, at a great distance, and after
so many publications, if we except certain infinitesimal details and certain
false forecasts, that it would be possible to make neither corrections nor
important complements. I will not repeat, since I am not writing a bibliography,
the list of the different writings of Marx or Engels -- of which we have
so many attempts from the Peasants' War (1850) down to his posthumous writings
on The Present Unity of Germany -- which are an application of the doctrine,
nor those of their successors and of the popularizers of scientific socialism.
Even in the socialist press we may read, from time to time, valuable attempts
at explanation of certain political events, in which is found, precisely
by reason of historic materialism, a clearness of vision which would be sought
in vain among the writers and the disputants who have not yet torn away the
fantastic veils and ideological envelopes of history.




Here is not the place to take up the defense of an abstract thesis, as
an advocate would do. It is evident, nevertheless, in all the histories which
have been written up to the present time, that there is always at bottom,
if not in the explicit intentions of the writers, certainly in their spirit,
a tendency, a principle, a general view of life; and so this doctrine, which
has enabled us to study the social structure in an objective manner, must
finally direct with precision the researches of history, and must end in
a narrative complete, transparent and integral.




Helps are not lacking.




Economics, which, as everyone sees it today, had its birth and development
as the science of bourgeois production, after being puffed up with the illusion
of representing the absolute laws of all forms of production, has through
the dear school of experience entered since, as everyone knows, upon a period
of self-criticism. Just as this self- criticism gave birth, on one side,
to critical communism, so on the other side it has given birth, through the
labor of the calmest, the wisest and the most prudent of the academic tradition,
to the historical school of economic phenomena. Thanks to this school, and
through the effect of the application of the descriptive and comparative
methods, we are henceforth in possession of a vast sum of knowledge on the
different historical forms of economics, from the most complex facts and
those best specified through essential differences of types, down to the
special domain of a cloister or a trade guild of the Middle Ages. The same
thing has taken place with statistics, which, by the indefinite combination
of its sources, succeeds now in throwing light, with a sufficient approximation,
upon the movement of population in past centuries.




These studies, certainly, are not made in the interest of our doctrine,
and oftener than not they are made in a spirit hostile to socialism; something
not observed, we may say in passing, by those foolish readers of printed
papers who so often confuse economic history, historical economics, and historical
materialism. But these studies, apart from the materials which they gather,
are remarkable in that they witness the progress which is in course of making
the internal history which, little by little, is taking the place of the
external history with which, for centuries, the men of letters and artists
were occupied.




A good part of these materials that have been gathered must always be
submitted to new corrections, as for that matter happens in every domain
of empirical knowledge, which oscillates continually between what is held
for certain and what is simply probable, and what must, later, be integrated
or eliminated.




The deductions and the combinations of the historians of economics, or
of those who relate history in general, availing themselves of the guiding
thread of economic phenomena, are not always so plausible or so conclusive,
that one does not feel the need of saying to them: All this must be taken
back and worked over. But that which is undoubted is the fact that in this
present time all writing of history tends to become a science, or, better,
a social discipline; and when that movement, now uncertain and multiform,
shall be accomplished, the efforts of the scholars and inquirers will lead
inevitably to the acceptance of economic materialism. By this incidence of
efforts and of scientific labors, which start from points so opposite, the
materialistic conception of all history will end by penetrating men's minds
as a definite conquest of thought; and this will finally take away from partisans
and adversaries the attempt to speak pro and con as for partisan theses.




Apart from the direct helps just enumerated, our doctrine has many indirect
helps, so that it can probably employ the results of many disciplines, in
which by reason of the greater simplicity of the relations, it has been possible
more easily to make the application of the genetic method. The typical case
is furnished by glottology, and in a more special fashion by the study which
has for its object the ancient languages.




The application of historical materialism is certainly, hitherto, very
far from that evidence and that clearness of processus of analysis and of
reconstruction. It would be consequently a vain attempt to try, at this moment,
to write a summary of universal history, which should propose to develop
all the varied forms of production in order to deduce from them afterwards
all the rest of human activity, in a particular and circumstantial fashion.
In the present state of knowledge, he who should try to give this compendium
of a new Kulturgeschichte would do nothing but translate into economic phraseology
the points of general orientation which, in other books, for example, in
Hellwald, give it in Darwinian phraseology.




It is a long step from the acceptance of the principle to its complete
and particular application to the whole of a vast province of facts, or to
a great succession of phenomena.




So the application of our doctrine must be kept for a moment to the exposition
and the study of definite parts of history. The modern forms are clear to
all. The economic developments of the bourgeoisie, the manifest knowledge
of the different obstacles which it has had to overcome in the different
countries, and, consequently, the development of the different revolutions,
taking this word in its broadest sense, contribute to make our understanding
of it easy. To our eyes the pre-history of the bourgeoisie, at the moment
of the decline of the Middle Ages, is equally clear, and it would not be
difficult to find, for example, in the development of the city of Florence,
an attested series of developments, in which the economic and statistical
movement finds a perfect correspondence in the political relations and a
sufficient illustration in the contemporary development of intelligence already
reduced into prose and stripped, in great part, of ideological illusions.
Nor would it be impossible to reduce, now, under the definite visual angle
of materialism, the whole of ancient Roman history. But for that, and particularly
for the primitive period, there are no direct sources; they are, on the contrary,
abundant in Greece, from popular tradition, the epic, and the authentic juridical
inscriptions, down to the pragmatic studies of the historical social relations.
At Rome, on the other hand, the struggles for political rights carry with
them almost always the economic reasons upon which they rest. Thus, the decline
of definite classes, the formation of new classes, the movement of conquest,
the change of the laws and of the forms of political array, appear to us
with perfect clearness. This Roman history is hard and prosaic; it was never
clad with these ideological complements which were suited to Greek life.
The rigid prose of conquest, of planned colonization, of institutions and
of the forms of law, conquered and devised for solving the problems arising
from definite frictions and contrasts, makes all Roman history a chain of
events which follow each other in a sequence which is grossly evident.




The true problem consists, indeed, not in substituting sociology for history,
as if the latter had been an appearance which conceals behind it a secret
reality, but in understanding history as a whole, in all its intuitive manifestations,
and in understanding it through the aid of economic sociology. It is not
a question of separating the accident from the substance, the appearance
from the reality, the phenomenon from the intrinsic kernel, or applying any
other formula used by the partisans of any species of scholasticism, but
of explaining the connection and the complexus precisely in so far as it
is a connection and a complexus. It is not merely a question of discovering
and determining the social groundwork, and then of making men appear upon
it like so many marionettes, whose threads are held and moved, no longer
by Providence but by economic categories. These categories have themselves
developed and are developing, like all the rest -- because men change as
to the capacity and the art of vanquishing, subduing, transforming and utilizing
natural conditions; because men change in spirit and attitude through the
reaction of their tools upon themselves; because men change in their respective
and co-associated relations; and therefore as individuals depending in various
degrees upon one another. We have, in fine, to do with history, and not with
its skeleton. We are dealing with narration and not with abstraction, with
the explaining and treating of the whole, and not merely with resolving and
analyzing it; we have to do, in a word, now, as always, with an art.




It may be that the sociologist who follows the principles of economic
materialism proposes to keep himself simply to the analysis, for example,
of what the classes were at the moment when the French Revolution broke out,
and to pass then to the classes that result from the Revolution and survive
it. In that case the titles, the indications and the classifications of the
materials to analyze are definite; they are, for example, the city and the
country, the artisan and the laborer, the nobles and the serfs, the land
which is freed from feudal charges, and the small proprietors who came into
being, commerce which frees itself from so many restrictions, money which
accumulates, industry which prospers, etc. There is nothing to object to
in the choice of this method, which, because it follows the track of embryonic
origins, was indispensable to the preparation of historical research according
to the direction of the new doctrine.(2*)




But we know that the study of embryonic origins does not suffice to make
us understand animal life, which is not a scheme, but is composed of living
beings which struggle, and in their struggle employ forces, instincts and
passions. And it is the same, mutatis mutandis, with men also, in so far
as they live historically. These particular men, moved by certain passions,
urged by certain circumstances, with such and such designs, such intentions,
acting in such an attempt with such an illusion of their own, or with such
a deception, of another, who, martyrs of themselves or of others, enter on
harsh contests and reciprocal suppressions of each other -- there is the
real history of the French Revolution. If, however, it is true that all history
is but the unfolding of definite economic conditions, it is equally true
that it develops only in definite forms of human activity -- whether the
latter be passionate or reflective, fortunate or unsuccessful, blindly instinctive
or deliberately heroic.




To understand the interlacings and the complexus in its inner connection
and its outer manifestations; to descend from the surface to the foundation,
and then to return from the foundation to the surface; to analyze the passions
and the intentions, in their motives, from the closest to the most remote,
and then to bring back the data of the passions and of the intentions and
of their causes to the most remote elements of a definite economic situation;
there is the difficult art which the materialistic conception must realize.




And as we must not imitate that teacher who on the bank taught his pupils
to swim by the definition of swimming, I beg the reader to await the examples
which I shall give in other essays in a real historical narration, working
over into a book which for some time I have already been doing in my teaching.




In this way certain secondary and derivative questions are once for all
cleared up.




What, for example, is the meaning of the lives of the great men?




In these later times, answers have been given, which, in one sense or
another, have an extreme character. On the one side, there are the extreme
sociologists, on the other side the individualists who, after the fashion
of Carlyle, put the heroes into the first rank of their history. According
to some it is sufficient to show what were the reasons, for example, of Caesarism,
and Caesar matters little. According to others, there are no objective reasons
of classes and social interests which suffice to explain anything; it is
the great minds which give the impulse to the whole historic movement; and
history has, so to speak, its lords and its monarchs. The empiricists of
narration extract themselves from embarrassment in a very simple fashion,
putting together at hazard men and things, objective necessities of fact
and subjective influences.




Historical materialism goes beyond the antithetical views of the sociologists
and the individualists, and at the same time it eliminates the eclecticism
of the empirical narrators.




First of all the factum.




Let this particular Caesar, as Napoleon was, be born in such a year, let
him follow such a career, and find himself ready for the Eighteenth Brumaire.
All this is completely accidental with relation to the general course of
things which was pushing the new class, mistress of the field, to save from
the Revolution that which appeared to it necessary to save, and that necessitated
the creation of a bureaucratico-military government. It was, however, necessary
to find the man, or the men. But what actually happened came about in the
fashion that we know. It depended on this fact, that it was Napoleon who
directed the enterprise and not a pitiable Monk, or a ridiculous Boulanger.
And from that moment the accident ceases to be accident, precisely because
it is this definite person who gives his imprint and physiognomy to the events,
determining the fashion or the manner in which they have unfolded.




The very fact that all history rests upon antitheses, contrasts, struggles
and wars, explains the decisive influence of certain men in definite occasions.
These men are neither a negligible accident of the social mechanism, nor
miraculous creators of what society, without them, could have made in no
other fashion. It is the very interlacings of the antithetic conditions,
which causes the fact that definite individuals, generous, heroic, fortunate,
mischievous, are called at critical moments to say the decisive word. As
long as the particular interests of the different social groups are in such
a state of tension, that all the parties in the struggle reciprocally paralyze
each other, then to make the political gearing move, there is need of the
individual consciousness of a definite individual.




The social antitheses, which make of every human community an unstable
organization, give to history, especially when it is seen and examined rapidly
and in its main features, the character of a drama. This drama in all its
relations is repeated from community to community, from nation to nation,
from state to state, because the inner inequalities concurring with the external
differentiations, have produced and produce the whole movement of wars, conquests,
treaties, colonizations, etc. In this drama have always appeared, in the
role of leaders of society, the men who are characterized as eminent, as
great, and empiricism has concluded from their presence that they were the
principal authors of history. To carry back the explanation of their appearance
to the general causes and the common conditions of the social structure,
is a thing which harmonizes perfectly with the data of our doctrine; but
to try to eliminate them, as certain affected objectivists of sociology would
willingly do, is pure capriciousness.




And to conclude, the partisan of historical materialism who sets himself
the task of explaining, or relating, cannot do it through schemes.




History has always received a definite form, with an infinite number of
accidents and variations. It has a certain grouping, it has a certain perspective.




It is not enough to have eliminated preventively the hypothesis of factors,
because the narrator constantly finds himself in the presence of things which
seem incongruous, independent, and sell-directing. To present the whole as
a whole, and to discover in it the continuous relations of the events which
border on each other, there is the difficulty.




The sum of events narrowly consecutive and precise gives the whole of
history; and this is equivalent to saying that it is all that we know of
our being, in so far as we are social beings and not simply natural beings.




XII




In the successive whole, and in the continuous necessity of all historical
events, is there, then, some ask, any meaning, any significance? This question,
whether it comes from the camp of the idealists, or whether it comes to us
from the mouth of the most circumspect critics, certainly, and in all cases,
demands our attention, and requires an adequate answer.




In fact, if we stop at the premises, intuitive or intellectual, from which
is derived the conception of progress as an idea which incloses and embraces
the total of the human processus, it is seen that these presumptions all
rest upon the mental need, which is in us, of attributing to one or more
series of events a certain sense and a certain signification. The conception
of progress, for whoever examines it carefully in its specific nature, always
implies judgements of estimation, and therefore, there is no one who can
confuse it with the crude and bare notion of simple development, which does
not contain that increment of value which makes us say of a thing that it
is progressing.




I have already said, and, it seems to me, at sufficient length, how it
is that progress does not exist as something imperative or regulative over
the natural and immediate succession of the generations of men. That is as
intuitive as is the actual coexistence of peoples, of nations and of states,
which find themselves, at the same time, in a different stage of development;
so undeniable is the actual condition of relative superiority and inferiority
of nation as compared with nation; and again so certain is the partial and
relative retrogression which has been produced several times in history,
as Italy has exemplified for centuries. Still more, if there is a convincing
proof of how progress must be understood in the sense of immediate law, and,
to use a strong expression, of a physical and inevitable law, it is precisely
this fact -- that social development by the very reasons of the processus
which are inherent in it, often leads to retrogression. It is evident, on
the other hand, that the faculty of progressing, like the possibility of
retrogressing, does not constitute, to begin with, an immediate privilege,
or an innate defect of a race, nor is either one the direct consequence of
geographical conditions. And, in fact, the primitive centers of civilization
were multiple, those centers have been removed in the course of centuries,
and finally the means, the discoveries, the results and the impulses of a
definite civilization, already developed, are within certain limits, communicable,
to all men indefinitely. In a word, progress and retrogression are inherent
in the conditions and the rhythm of social development.




Now then, the faith in the universality of progress, which appeared with
so much violence in the eighteenth century, rests upon this first positive
fact, that men, when they do not find obstacles in external conditions, or
do not find them in those which result. from their own work in their social
environment, are all capable of progress.




Moreover, at the bottom of this supposed or imagined unity of history,
in consequence of which the processus of the different societies would form
one single series of progress, there is another fact, which has offered motive
and occasion for so many fantastic ideologies. If all nations have not progressed
equally, still more, if some have stopped and have followed a backward route,
if the processus of social development has not always, in every place and
in all times, the same rhythm and the same intensity, it is nevertheless
certain that, with the passage of the decisive activity from one people to
another people in the course of history, the useful products, already acquired
by those who were in decadence, have been transmitted to those who were growing
and rising. That is not so true of the products of sentiment and imagination,
which nevertheless are themselves preserved and perpetuated in literary tradition,
as of the results of thought, and especially of the discovery and of the
production of technical means, which, once found, are communicated and transmitted
directly.




Need we remind the reader that writing was never lost, although the peoples
who invented it have disappeared from historic continuity? Need we recall
again that we all have in our pockets, engraved on our watches, the Babylonian
dial, and that we make use of algebra, which was introduced by those Arabs,
whose historical activity has since been dispersed like the sands of the
desert? It is useless to multiply these examples, because it is sufficient
to think of technology and the history of discoveries in the broad sense
of the word, for which the almost continuous transmission of the instruments
of labor and production is evident.




And after all, the provisional summaries which are called universal histories,
although they always reveal, in their aim and in their execution, something
forced and artificial, would never have been attempted if human events had
not offered to the empiricism of the narrators a certain thread, even though
subtle, of continuity.




Take for example the Italy of the sixteenth century, which is evidently
in decadence; but while it is declining, it transmits to the rest of Europe
its intellectual weapons. These are not all that pass to the civilization
which continues, but even the world market establishes itself upon the foundation
of those geographical discoveries, and those discoveries in the naval art,
which were the work of Italian merchants, travelers and sailors. It is not
only the methods of the art of war and the refinements of political diplomacy
which passed outside of Italy (though it is only with these that men of letters
ordinarily concerned themselves), but even the art of making money, which
had acquired all the evidence of an elaborate commercial discipline, and
one after the other the rudiments of the science, upon which is founded modern
technique, and to begin with all the methodical irrigation of fields and
the general laws of hydraulics. All that is so precisely true, that an amateur
in conjectural theses might come to the point of asking himself this question:
what would have become of Italy, in this modern bourgeois epoch, if, executing
the project of the Venetian Senate (1504) of making something which would
have resembled in its effects a piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, the Italian
navy had found itself in a direct struggle with the Portuguese in the Indian
Ocean, at the very moment when the shifting of historical activity from the
Mediterranean to the ocean prepared the decadence of Italy? But enough of
fantasy!




A certain historical continuity, in the empirical and circumstantial sense
of the transmission and the successive increase of the means of civilization,
is then an incontestable fact. And, although this fact excludes all idea
of preconceived design, of intentional or hidden finality, or pre-established
harmony and all the other whimsicalities in regard to which there has been
such a deal of speculation, it does not exclude, for all that, the idea of
progress, which we can utilize as an estimation of the course human development.
It is undeniable that progress does not embrace materially the succession
of generations, and that its conception implies nothing categorical, considering
that societies have also been in retrogression, but that does not prevent
this idea from serving as a guiding thread and a measure to give a meaning
to the historical processus. There is no common ground for critics who are
prudent, in the use of specific concepts as in the method or their application,
and those poor extreme evolutionists, who are scientists without the grammar
and the principle of science, that is to say, without logic.




As I have said several times, ideas do not fall from heaven, and even
those which, at a given moment arise from definite situations with the impetuosity
of faith and with a metaphysical garb, carry always within themselves the
index of their correspondence with the order of the facts, of which the explanation
is sought or attempted. The idea of progress, as the unifier of history,
appears with violence and becomes a giant in the eighteenth century, that
is to say, in the heroic period of the intellectual and political life of
the revolutionary bourgeoisie. Just as this engendered, in the order of its
works, the most intensive period of history that is known, it also produced
its own ideology in the notion of progress. This ideology in its substance
means that capitalism is the only form of production which is capable of
extending all over the earth and of reducing the whole human race to conditions
which resemble each other everywhere. If modern technique can be transported
everywhere, if all the human race appear on a single field of competition
and all the world as a single market, what is there astonishing in the ideology
which, reflecting intellectually these conditions of fact, reaches the affirmation
that the present historical unity has been prepared by everything which precedes
it? Translating this concept of pretended preparation into the altogether
natural concept of successive condition, and there is opened before us the
road by which the passage is made from the ideology of progress to historical
materialism; and now we arrive at the affirmation of Marx, that this form
of bourgeois production is the last antagonistic form of the processus of
society.




The miracles of the bourgeois epoch, in the unification of the social
processus, find no parallel in the past. Here are the whole New World, Australia,
Northern Africa, and New Zealand! And they all resemble us! And the rebound
in the extreme East is made through imitation, and in Africa through conquest!
In the presence of this universality and this cosmopolitanism, the acquisition
of the Celts and the Iberians to Roman civilization, and of the Germans and
that the Slavs to the cycle of Roman Byzantine Christian civilization shrink
into insignificance. This ever-growing unification is reflected more every
day in the political mechanism of Europe; this mechanism, because founded
on the economic conquest of the other parts of the world, oscillates henceforth
with the flux and reflux which come from the most distant regions. In this
most complicated mingling of action and reactions the war between Japan and
China, made with methods imitated, or directly borrowed, from European technique,
leaves its traces, deep and far-reaching, in the diplomatic relations of
Europe, and still clearer traces in the stock exchange, which is the faithful
interpreter of the consciousness of our time. This Europe, mistress of all
the rest of the world, has recently seen the relations of the politics of
the states of which it is composed oscillate in consequence of a revolt in
the Transvaal, and in consequence of the ill success of the Italian armies
in Abyssinia in these last days.(3*)




The centuries which have prepared and carried to its present form the
economic domination of bourgeois production have also developed the tendency
to a unification of history under a general view: and in this fashion we
find explained and justified the ideology of progress, which fills so many
books of the philosophy of history and of Kulturgeschichte. The unity of
social form, that is to say, the unity of the capitalistic form of production,
to which the bourgeoisie has tended for centuries, is reflected in the conception
of the unity of history in more suggestive forms than the mind could ever
have received from the narrow cosmopolitanism of the Roman empire or the
one-sided cosmopolitanism of the Catholic Church.




But this unification of the social life, by the working of the capitalist
form of production, developed itself from the beginning, and continues to
develop itself, not according to preconceived rules, plans and designs, but,
on the contrary, by reason of frictions and struggles, which in their sum
form a colossal complication of antitheses. War without and war within. Struggle
incessant among the nations, and struggles incessant between the members
of each nation. And the interlacings of the deeds and the action of so many
emulators, competitors and adversaries is so complicated, that the co-ordination
of events very often escapes the attention, and it is a very difficult thing
to discover their intimate connection. The struggle which actually exists
among men, the struggles which now, with various methods, are unfolding among
nations and within nations, have come to make us understand better in the
midst of what difficulties the history of the past has unfolded. If the bourgeois
ideology, reflecting the tendency to capitalist unification, has proclaimed
the progress of the human race, historical materialism, on the contrary,
and without proclamation, has discovered that these are the antitheses which
have thus far been the cause and the motive of all historical events.




Thus the movement of history, taken in general, appears to us as it were
oscillating -- or rather, to use a more appropriate image, it seems that
it is unfolding on a line often interrupted, and at certain moments it seems
to return upon itself, sometimes it stretches out, removing itself far from
the point of departure -- in an actual zigzag.




Granted the internal complication of every society, and granted the meeting
of several societies on the field of competition (from the ingenuous forms
of robbery, rapine and piracy to the refined methods of the elegant sport
of the stock exchange) it is natural that every historical result, when it
is measured in the one measure of individual expectation, appears very often
like chance, and afterwards, considered theoretically, becomes for the mind
more inextricable than the track of meteors.




Speaking of the irony which sits as a sovereign above history is not a
simple phrase; because, in truth, if there is no god of Epicurus laughing
above over human affairs, here below human affairs are of themselves playing
a divine comedy.




Will this irony of human destinies ever cease? Will that form of association
ever be possible which gives room for the possible complete development of
all aptitudes, in such a way that the ulterior processus of history may become
a real and true evolution? And, to speak like the amateurs of high-sounding
phrases, will there ever be a humanization of all men? When once in the communism
of production the antitheses which are now the cause and the effect of economic
differentiations are eliminated, will not all human energies acquire a very
high degree of efficacy and intensity in co- operative effects, and at the
same time will they not develop with a greater liberty of self- expression
among all individuals?




It is in the affirmative answers to these questions that consists what
critical communism says, that is to say, foresees, of the future. But it
does not say it and it does not foretell it as if it were discussing an abstract
possibility, or like him who wishes, by his will, to give life to a state
of things which he desires and which he dreams. But it says and predicts
because what it announces must inevitably happen by the immanent necessity
of history, seen and studied henceforth in the foundation of its economic
substructure.




"It is only in an order of things where there will no longer be classes
and class antagonisms that social revolutions will cease to be political
revolutions."(4*)




"To the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms
will succeed an association in which the free development of each is the
condition of the free development of all."




"The relations of bourgeois production are the last antagonistic
form of the social processus of production -- a form antagonistic not in
the sense of individual antagonism, but of the antagonism which proceeds
from the conditions of the social life of individuals; but the productive
forces which are developing in the lap of bourgeois society are creating
at the same time the material conditions to terminate that antagonism. With
this social organization ends the prehistory of the human race."(5*)




"With the taking possession of the means of production on the part
of society, is excluded the production of commodities, and with it the dominance
of the product over the producer. The anarchy which dominates in social production
will be succeeded by conscious organization. The struggle for individual
existence will cease. Only in this way man will detach himself, in a certain
sense, from the animal world in a definite fashion, and will pass from a
condition of animal existence to conditions of human existence. The entire
sum of the conditions of life which has thus far dominated men will pass
under the rule and the examination of men themselves, who will thus for the
first time become the real masters of nature, because they will be the masters
of their own association. The laws of their own social activity, which had
been outside of them like foreign laws imposed upon them, will be applied
and mastered by the men themselves, with full knowledge of their cause. Their
very association, which appeared to men as if imposed by nature and history,
will become their own and their free work.




The foreign and objective forces, which till then dominated history, will
pass under the care of men. Only from that moment will men make their own
history with full understanding; only from that moment will the social causes
which they put in motion, be able to arrive, in great part and in a proportion
ever increasing, at the desired effects. It is the leap of the human race
from the reign of necessity into that of liberty. To accomplish this action
emancipating the world, such is the historic mission of the modern proletariat."




If Marx and Engels had been phrasemakers, if their spirit had not been
made prudent, even scrupulous, by the daily and minute use and application
of scientific methods, if the permanent contact with so many conspirators
and visionaries had not given them a horror of every Utopia, opposing it
indeed up to the point of pedantry, these formulas might pass for good-natured
paradoxes, which criticism need not examine. But these formulas are, as it
were, the close, the effective conclusion of the doctrine of historic materialism.
They are the direct result of the criticism of economies and of historical
dialectics.




In these formulas, which may be developed, as I have had occasion to show
elsewhere, is summed up every forecast of the future, which is not and is
not intended for a romance or a Utopia. And in these very formulas there
is an adequate and conclusive response to the question with which this chapter
began: Is there in the series of historic events a meaning and a significance?




THE END




NOTES:




1. This genetic study forms the subject of my first essay, In Memory
of the Communist Manifesto, which is the indispensable preamble to an
understanding of all the rest.




2. I allude to the excellent work of Karl Kautsky, Die Klassengensaetze
von 1789.




3. Marx, Misere de la Philosophie, Paris, 1847, p. 178.




4. Communist Manifesto, p. 16.




5. Marx, Zur Kritik der poltisichen Oekonomie, Berlin, 1859, p.
6 Pref. Compare my first Essay, pp. 48-50.